ABSTRACT
The idea of a sentencing commission to establish presumptive sentencing guidelines, to monitor and provide feedback to the sentencing system, owes its origin to a proposal of Judge Marvin E. Frankel that was offered in a lecture at the University of Cincinnati Law School. Scholarly analysis and the judgment of most Minnesota criminal justice professionals, including the judges, agree that the Minnesota guidelines system brought greater predictability and a larger justice to sentencing in that state than obtained. Many states and the federal system have followed in Minnesota's footsteps. Canadian and Australian commissions have urged that those countries do likewise. The academic and judicial criticisms of sentencing practice came from the political left; the popular and political criticisms from the political right and center. The voluntary guidelines approach has been found ineffective in reducing sentencing disparity or significantly altering the pattern of disparate sentences that judges impose.
