Punishment Units

Rationale

Although underlying purposes of sentences may vary, a guiding principle of American jurisprudence is that there should be proportionality between the seriousness of the crime and the severity of the penalty imposed. The importance of relating the weight of the punishment to the gravity of the criminal act means that a practical approach is needed for comparing the relative bite of different criminal sanctions. The value of having a simple method for doing so suggests the desirability of establishing a scale of punishment units.

The need for some way of gauging how much of a given penalty is equivalent to a certain quantity of another became increasingly apparent as the range of available nonprison penalties and intermediate sanctions expanded. The idea of punishment units arose as a means of facilitating the principled integration of multiple and varied noncustodial penalties into a comprehensive sanctioning system. The purpose is to allow judges and other decision makers to employ a variety of punishments within a reasoned and structured framework.

Early sentencing guidelines typically focused on which categories of offenders presumptively would receive sentences to incarceration and which would be placed on probation, providing no guidance as to the types of conditions to be imposed on offenders receiving nonprison sentences. As more and more sites began to add intermediate punishments to their armamentaria of sanctions, the need to have a means of assessing the relative weight or punishment power of these nontraditional penalties [Page 369]became clear. Subsequently, a number of jurisdictions undertook efforts to rank penalties in terms of dimensions such as how onerous or intrusive they were and to arrange them on a continuum of sanctions. The quest for scoring systems and scales that provide a simple way of comparing the relative degree of punitiveness in an array of criminal penalties has continued, and this demand could be satisfied by an agreed-upon set of punishment units.

Devising a System that Incorporates Punishment Units

In theory, designing a system for use of punishment units is fairly straightforward. It requires identifying the full range of criminal sanctions available in a particular jurisdiction and deciding what quantity of each is equivalent to a specific amount of the others. For example, it would be necessary to decide how many hours of community service or days of house arrest would be counted as equal in weight to a $500 fine or a three-month stay in a halfway house.

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