Leymon 15
It is also possible that guidelines have had a significant effect on the number of new commitments
and parole violators. Steffensmeier and Demuth (2000) argued that guidelines could lead to a widening
of the net
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of those who are sentenced to prison in three possible ways. First, it may be likely that some
convicted criminals of relatively small crimes would not have gone to prison if guidelines had not been in
place. Supreme Court decisions have concluded that inmates only need to be sent to prison if they were
sentenced to more than one year. It is plausible that under guidelines relatively minor crimes that would
have resulted in a sentence of less than a year would, under guidelines, be sentenced to more than a year,
leading to a direct impact on new commitments. Second, guidelines may lead to more criminals being
sentenced to prison time rather than probation. In this situation, there would be a widening of the net of
those who go to prison as new commitments. Third, many of the versions of the various sentencing
guidelines mandate that prisoners released from prison be placed under supervised parole, rather than
unconditional release. A significant increase in parole violators returned to prison might be possible
under sentencing guidelines. The effects on sentencing guidelines are not expected to be as influential on
new individuals entering the system as on those continuing in it. Because inmate growth can be caused
by growth in the average length of sentence or by an increase in the number of persons going to prison,
models including controls for new individuals entering the system and models without these controls are
considered.
Other variables under investigation include the unemployment rate, poverty rate, percent black,
percent white, and percent Hispanic. Research has shown that they are significantly associated with
prison populations, indicating that their inclusion is vital to the analysis (Western and Pettit, 2005;
Western and Pettit, 2000; Walker et al., 2000). The violent crime rate is also an important variable
included in this analysis; one of the primary justifications for guidelines given by public policy makers
was that they are needed to counter a perceived growth in violent crime in America (Bureau of Justice
Assistance, 1996). Of course this argument is not unique to guidelines, but is particularly relevant to this
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Net widening is a term most commonly used to describe a phenomenon whereby a program or new legislation is set up
to divert or maintain the current level of institutional placement or some other type of court disposition, but instead,
merely brings more individuals into the justice system, in this particular case prisons, who previously would never have
entered. Instead of shrinking the "net" of social control, one actually "widens" it to bring more in.
Convention