Sentencing Fragments: Penal Reform in America, 1975-2025

"Michael Tonry offers a brilliant critique of U.S. sentencing. He cautions that current strategies to reduce mass incarceration-such as lowering sentences for nonviolent offenders or focusing on short-term savings-miss the mark and will backfire. The problems are far more foundational. Sentencing Fragments, blending elegantly narrated history, acute analysis, and comprehensive empirical work, calls for massive legislative and institutional change. It is a must read for anyone interested in understanding American sentencing and in reversing America's experiment in mass incarceration." -Joan Petersilia and Robert Weisberg, Co-directors, Stanford University Criminal Justice Center

"Sentencing Fragments offers a compelling historical overview of sentencing policy in America during the last several decades. A leading researcher in both the U.S and Europe, Tonry is uniquely positioned to provide transatlantic context which helps explain why incarceration rose exponentially in the U.S. but not in Europe. He presents invaluable insights into how the U.S. arrived at this point, and offers provocative suggestions for reducing incarceration in the future." -Marc A. Levin, Policy Director of Right on Crime, and Director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation's Center for Effective Justice

"American political leaders, liberal and conservative alike, agree that American sentencing is deeply unjust and that mass incarceration must be reduced. Voters in several states have enacted sweeping reforms, yet the scope of legislative change has been limited. Solving the crisis of mass incarceration will require our elected leaders to fundamentally recast punitive laws and rebuild sentencing systems from the ground up. Michael Tonry's compellingSentencing Fragments spells out precisely what needs to be done, why, and how." -Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union