A Quarter-Century of Structured Sentencing

The governor has proclaimed today, October 1, 2019, as Structured Sentencing Day. It has been 25 years since North Carolina’s primary sentencing law for felonies and misdemeanors came into effect. Let’s take a moment to reflect on a quarter-century of grid-based sentencing. The General Assembly passed the Structured Sentencing Act, S.L. 1993-538, in 1993. It was initially slated to come into effect for offenses committed on or after January 1, 1995, but that date was advanced to October 1, 1994 during a special legislative session focused on crime. To understand the origins of Structured Sentencing requires some knowledge of the state of affairs in North Carolina’s correctional system in the 1980s and early 1990s. You can read the full history here (it’s not that long, and if you’re a reader of this blog I know you’ll find it interesting), but the short version goes like this. Under Fair Sentencing (the sentencing law in effect from 1981 to 1994), North Carolina’s prison system became overcrowded to a point of crisis. The legislature enacted a prison population cap and gave the Parole Commission the power to release prisoners early to stay under it. The court system responded by imposing longer sentences, knowing that they would be discounted on the back end through early release. There was an overwhelming sense that sentences were not truthful, as many inmates would serve only a fifth (or less) of their imposed prison term before being released. And in any event the early release efforts were not enough, [...]