Impact of State Sentencing Policies on Incarceration Rates in the United States, 1975-2002

In order to assess the impacts of state-level sentencingand corrections policies in the United States implemented between 1975and 2002 on state incarceration rates during that same time period,researchers conducted a two-phase study between November 2002 andMarch 2004. The first phase of the research involved building aframework for understanding the types of state-level sentencing andcorrections policies in use between 1975 and 2002. Phase two of theproject consisted of state-level data collection for all 50 states forall study years, 1975 to 2002. The researchers produced a datasetcontaining outcome variables that focus on the change and growth instate incarceration rates, non-policy control variables that werefound in previous studies to be associated with changes inincarceration rates, and policy variables regarding sentencingstructure, drug policy, time served requirements, habitual offenderlaws (HOL), and mandatory sentences.