ABSTRACT
There is bipartisan consensus that criminal justice reform is critically needed in the United States. The current criminal justice system is extraordinarily expensive. In fact, in 2020, the Federal Bureau of Prisons – a single agency in the executive branch – had an operating budget exceeding that of the entire judicial branch, a co-equal branch of the government developed by the framers. In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton stated that a judge has “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment”. This refrain is no truer than in the realm of sentencing. Federal sentencing judges review lengthy pre-sentence investigation reports prepared by the United States Probation Office, which lay out the personal history and criminal background of the defendants. Since 1987, the predominant solution to sentencing disparities has been the federal sentencing guidelines, a manual of non-binding recommendations from the US Sentencing Commission that inform judges’ sentencing practices.
