The Future of Sentencing and Parole: A Delphi Reassessment of Sentencing and Parole Reforms

Abstract

The past decade has seen the rise and, more recently, the slowing of a national movement to reform criminal sentencing in the United States. In the early 1970s several states were in the process of enacting legislation or administrative changes in the imposition of criminal sanctions. Although the celeritous growth and spread of sentencing reform has abated in more recent years, there is still considerable activity in the area of sentencing reform. This work reports a comparison of expectations for reform held over time by both academics and agency practitioners. The objective of the research reported here was to determine how, if at all, perspectives on sentencing reform had changed, given an opportunity to review early reform efforts. To measure this change in expectations, a replication of our earlier Delphi with agency and academic experts (Travis & O'Leary, 1979) was conducted during 1983. Thus, we are able to compare estimates given five years earlier (1978) with these more recent estimates. This research has three purposes. First, it seeks to determine how, if at all, expert predictions of the occurrence of specific reforms in criminal justice have changed over a five-year period. Second, it allows a comparison of estimates given by practitioners with those provided by academics. Such a comparison allows an opportunity to investigate how academic and practitioner views of criminal justice differ, if at all. Finally, it provides estimates of the likely nature of many criminal justice practices in the future, and thereby allows an identification of the types of things which can be expected to change as well as those which will be resistant to reform.