The Massachusetts Trial Court departments that have a major role in sentencing have produced sentencing best practices documents. This is a significant achievement. Here is an article describing the key Best Practice Principles. They are the product of more than a year of hard work by broad-based committees and are extraordinary data-driven consensus best practices recommendations for judges and practitioners. Here is the Superior Court PDF including the Best Practice Principles and Commentary, and the website for all of the documents.
The George Mason University School of Law Judicial Education Program presented an excellent program on the economics of crime, formally titled “Judicial Symposium on Using the Law and Economics to Reform the System of Criminal Justice: Theory, Empirical Evidence and Some Applications. There was lots of thought provoking material presented including that incarceration and other sanctions can be viewed much as in torts law, as costs that are part of a cost-benefit analysis. The upshot is that if some of our criminal justice dollars were spent elsewhere, we would have less crime and fewer victims. There was lots of great information conveyed in this conference with the entire program on video on the web.
This study is one of a number which suggest only a moderate impact of incarceration on the crime rate:
This article (book chapter) has broader application than the title would suggest because it seems to be about a lot more than just electronic monitoring. The author argues that the data strongly recommends shifting a large segment of the jail and prison population to non-incarceration correctional choices.
MassCJ 