How Courts Are Rethinking Criminal Sentencing

New York Times

26-06-2025

Dear Headway reader,
It was called the 'McDonaldization of punishment.'
In the 1990s, alarm over high crime rates led to a raft of laws that limited the discretion the justice system applied to individual defendants. Measures such as 'three strikes and you're out' laws aimed to ensure that the system wouldn't be too lenient on those who seemed to demonstrate a propensity for crime.
Then the United States prison population exploded in size, even as anticipated waves of violent crime never materialized and crime levels in the country declined to historic lows.
By the mid-2010s, bipartisan agreement that incarceration had gotten out of control led to support for measures that tackle the tough cases of potential overincarceration. In June, Issie Lapowsky reported for Headway on the lessons of one such initiative that came from an unlikely source: prosecutors.
Whom prison reform left behind
In 2018, California passed the nation's first prosecutor-initiated resentencing law.
'Bipartisan demand to shrink the ballooning U.S. prison population was mounting,' Issie reports. 'Yet prosecutors — who all had old cases with needlessly long sentences weighing on their consciences — were being sidelined from discussions about proposed reforms.'
Hilary Blout, who had worked as a prosecutor under Kamala Harris in the San Francisco district attorney's office, consulted with fellow prosecutors across California to draft a law that would let them identify cases to the court where lesser sentences might be merited.
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