Beyond Sentencing Guidelines: Additional Functions for Intermediate Sentencing Entities

The first part of this two-part special issue on structured sentencing in the U.S. focused on individual jurisdictions and the relationship of five types of sentencing reforms to judicial discretion and to the political and legal forces that originated, maintained, altered or sometimes ended the reform. This issue moves the focus to a comparative one, looking across a variety of different jurisdictions to report common threads of advantage and disadvantage to the various structured sentencing systems. Originating in political and legal arenas, structured sentencing affects not only the sentencing process, but can itself affect the political process and the distribution of sanctioning discretion among the different branches of government.