Examines the causes for mass incarceration of Americans and calls for the reform of the bail system. Traces the history of bail, how it has come to be an oppressive tool of the courts, and makes recommendations for reforming the bail system and alleviating the mass incarceration problem.
Pretrial services (PS) programs can be valuable resources for making significant improvements in the criminal justice system because they are used in the early stages of the criminal case process. This report provides a review of issues and practices in the PS field. It describes how pretrial programs operate, discusses key policy issues, and outlines issues and challenges for the future. It pays particular attention to how PS programs obtain and convey information relevant to the pretrial release/detention decision. Describes how PS agencies, the court, and other criminal justice system agencies can work together to minimize the risks of nonappearance and pretrial crime.
This paper provides an overview of the federal sentencing system. For historicalcontext, it first briefly discusses the evolution of federal sentencing during the past fourdecades, including the landmark passage of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (SRA),1 inwhich Congress established a new federal sentencing system based primarily on sentencingguidelines, as well as key Supreme Court decisions concerning the guidelines. It thendescribes the nature of federal sentences today and the process by which such sentencesare imposed. The final parts of this paper address appellate review of sentences; therevocation of offenders' terms of probation and supervised release; the process whereby theUnited States Sentencing Commission (the Commission) amends the guidelines; and theCommission's collection and analysis of sentencing data.