North Carolina Structured Sentencing Act

There was a need to change the way that criminals were sentenced in order to lower the prison population, and ensure that the people that were spending time in prison were there for necessary reasons, and that they were serving an adequate amount of time based on their criminal history, and their current level of crime.

The structured sentencing act put fair and clear cut guidelines for a judge to follow, while ensuring the publics interest was still being looked after.

[1] North Carolina was suffering from a growing prison population and not enough facilities to house the increase in the number of beds that would be needed based on projections.

The information obtained from these projections led North Carolina to create the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission in 1990 to evaluate and recommend a new procedure to help remedy this upcoming problem.

[1] The advisory board looked at the different prison population statistics along with the offender records, and the punishments that were received.

[1] In the structured sentencing guidelines it sets the courts up to look at a person's prior criminal history.

These categories are used to help determine the sentence length and type of punishment that a person will receive for the crime that is committed.

The guidelines set a minimum, as well as a maximum that a person can receive based on the category of the crime, and their record level.

Good behavior and programs still could be used to earn time off, which helped people to be released by the minimum instead of having to serve the full maximum sentence.

Mitigating factors could be anything from time at a job, family situation, or different actions that were taken after committing the crime that will look good and act in their favor, such as anger management classes or substance abuse classes.

These could include if the person has not followed through with court recommendations, or if the defendant does not have a job or any sort of history of stability in their life.

[1] If a person receives an active sentence then they must serve their time in jail or prison.

Community is the least severe of punishments and could include anything from a basic fine to supervised probation.

[2] In 1997 the Ford Foundation and Harvard University recognized the North Carolina Structured Sentencing Act as one of their ten recipients for the Innovations in American Government award.

[3] After evaluating North Carolinas structured sentencing, Georgia decided to move in the same direction.

This new law, enacted by the legislature in 2011, moves back towards parole and goes against the structured sentencing guidelines.