Sentencing Guideline Schemes Across the United States and Beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Sentencing guidelines are among a number of mechanisms that have been used to address the problem of how to balance sufficient discretion to individualize sentences with sufficient constraint to ensure equal justice and achieve other sentencing policy goals. The difference in where that balance lies is a policy choice that distinguishes the various sentencing guideline systems. This essay examines those policy choices. It assesses the federal and Minnesota guideline systems and the system operating in England. It describes the rejection of guidelines in New Zealand, Canada, and Australia, which challenges the values of structured sentencing. Finally, the benefits and disadvantages of guidelines are looked at alongside the conditions necessary for their successful implementation. The best of the guideline systems are not perfect, but they indicate how other jurisdictions can better regulate sentencing discretion in order to promote both proportionate and equal outcomes at the levels of both theory and practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".