The Implementation Of The California Determinate Sentencing Law

Download or read book The Implementation of the California Determinate Sentencing Law written by Jonathan D. Casper and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 1, 1977, California began a major reform in its policy dealing with prison sentences. The Uniform Determinate Sentence Law (to be referred to here as the DSL) became effective on this day, replacing a system of indeterminate sentencing (to be called here ISL) that had been in existence for sixty years. The new DSL thus radically changed the process under which prison term lengths were set, and removing some of the extraordinary uncertainty characterizing the open-ended sentences of the ISL. It is clearly early to begin the process of attempting to assess the effects of the California DSL, as only a few years have passed since it went into effect and its ultimate impacts may take years to be fully worked out. In addition to providing information about how the new law has affected and been mediated by court disposition processes, we also are concerned with a somewhat broader issue, that of the impact or implementation process in general. How does the impact of California DSL inform us about the general process by which public policy is made at the legislative level and then translated into behavioral changes by other decision makers whose job it is to "implement" the policies of the legislature? How, in this case, does implementation of the DSL illuminate the process by which sentencing policy is made, implemented, and modified as time goes by?