Prior Dangerous Criminal Behavior and Sentencing Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines

Abstract

The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are the only sentencing system in the United States that measures the offense severity of a prior conviction based upon the length of its imposed sentence, assigning up to three points for the longest prior sentence lengths. However, the prior sentences grouped within any of the point categories may have vastly different levels of dangerous behavior, such as violence, victim injury, or weapon use. Dangerousness is an important concept in the Guidelines criminal history computation because the Guidelines reference, at least in part, the role of incapacitation in sentencing: in order to protect the public from potential future crimes, longer sentences are appropriate for offenders with higher likelihoods of recidivism. If research shows the offenders with prior dangerous conduct are more likely to recidivate, such a Guidelines structure would assign longer confinement sentences to those dangerous offenders. The purpose of the study is to examine how accurately the current federal Guidelines criminal history score classifies the severity of prior criminal conduct. The analysis uses information from the U.S. Sentencing Commission's Intensive Study Sample data, a file with detailed offense and offender information coded for a five-percent random sample of all federal convictions covered by the Guidelines in fiscal year 1995. The empirical presentation includes a description of the characteristics of the prior convictions of Guidelines offenders and the distribution by offense types. Additionally, it examines how the elements of dangerousness (victim injury, violence, and weapon presence) are correlated with the type of prior offense and prior conviction measures. The analysis shows that dangerousness levels for prior convictions are often inconsistent with the Guidelines' one-, two-, and three-point assignment system based on prior sentence length.