Congressional Purpose of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines

This entry is the second in the Nacchio Sentencing Series and answers the following question:

2.  What is the purpose of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines legislation?

To understand how Judge Nottingham will decide Nacchio’s sentence, a basic understanding of the Congressional intent in establishing the federal sentencing guidelines is necessary.  Congress enacted “The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984” to establish sentencing guidelines that would further the basic purposes of criminal punishment--deterring crime, incapacitating the offender, providing just punishment, and rehabilitating the offender.  The act delegates to the United States Sentencing Commission broad authority to review and rationalize the federal sentencing process.

The statute contains many detailed instructions as to how this determination should be made, but the most important of them instructs the Commission to create categories of offense behavior and offender characteristics. An offense behavior category might consist, for example, of ‘insider trading.’ An offender characteristic category might be ‘offender with one prior conviction who was not sentenced to imprisonment.’ The Commission is required to prescribe guideline ranges that specify an appropriate sentence for each class of convicted persons, to be determined by coordinating the offense behavior categories with the offender characteristic categories.  Where the guidelines call for imprisonment, the range must be narrow: the maximum imprisonment cannot exceed the minimum by more than the greater of 25 percent or six months.

To understand these guidelines, one must begin with the three objectives that Congress, in enacting the new sentencing law, sought to achieve. Its basic objective was to enhance the ability of the criminal justice system to reduce crime through an effective, fair sentencing system. To achieve this objective, Congress first sought honesty in sentencing. It sought to avoid the confusion and implicit deception that arose out of the past sentencing system which required a judge to impose an indeterminate sentence that was automatically reduced in most cases by ‘good time’ credits.  Consequently, Congress eliminated the parole system and imposed a minimum time that must be served—85% of the actual sentence.  Second, Congress sought uniformity in sentencing by narrowing the wide disparity in sentences imposed by different federal courts for similar criminal conduct by similar offenders. Third, Congress sought proportionality in sentencing through a system that imposes appropriately different sentences for criminal conduct of different severity.  These three Congressional objectives will be applied in the entries for the remaining questions in this series.