A Different Kind Of Sentencing Commission: A “Smart” Solution For California And A Model For Prison Downsizing Across The Country

Joan Petersilia and Francis Cullen begin their thoughtful and provocative article Liberal but Not Stupid: Meeting the Promise of Downsizing Prisons with a rather startling conclusion: “[T]he era of mass imprisonment in the United States likely has ended.”1 Petersilia and Cullen argue that the wave of prison expansion across the country over the past thirty years has crested—citing reduced rates of incarceration nationwide, a number of recent prison reforms enacted in several large states, and evidence that “tough on crime” politics has lost its punch. Petersilia and Cullen peer over the wave and urge a conscientious (“not stupid”) pace to future prison downsizing, prioritizing empirically proven policies, scholarly observation, and commitment to public safety. According to Petersilia and Cullen, we are at an historical moment where conditions are ripe to fundamentally rethink and reshape the country’s criminal justice system—so we better not blow it. Petersilia and Cullen worry that progressive criminologists and their reformist allies may ride the changing tide and overcorrect with policies and programs that do not address the true causes of crime and incarceration, pay short shrift to recidivism, could endanger public safety, and may reignite the reactionary throw-away-the-key politics that created the mess in the first place. Petersilia and Cullen offer broad guiding principles for reform, rightly drawing lessons from the historical prison crowding problems and recent reforms in California. Amazingly, as they point out, the drop in incarceration