Sentencing Nerd Red Alert!

Over at The Crime Report, Ted Gest reports on the creation of a new panel of sentencing scholars who will be studying just how we got into this mess of having the world's biggest prison population:

Eighteen of the country’s leading scholars and experts on corrections and related fields have launched a major project to study the “causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration” in the United States.

The panel of scholars, chaired by Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, will examine the reasons for the dramatic increases in U.S. incarceration rates since the 1970s, which have produced one of the world’s highest incarceration levels—with more than 2.3 million people behind bars in U.S. prisons and jails at any time. 

The topic has been widely discussed and analyzed for years by advocacy groups on the left and right, as well as by individual scholars. But the two-year, $1.5 million project, convened by the National Research Council (part of the National Academy of Sciences) represents the first time in recent memory that these issues have been subject to wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary research.

Whoo-hoo, sentencing nerds!  We can't wait to see what they produce.  We hope that they will pay particular attention to mandatory minimum sentencing policies -- whether they work, what they cost us, and how much they've contributed to our explosive prison growth.

Read more about what the panel will study right here.