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1 American Sentencing—Law and Practice Beginning in the mid-1970s, prison populations in the United States rose sharply and continuously for more than three decades (O’Hear, 2017, xiv). By the end of the “imprisonment boom,” the American rate of imprison- ment had more than quintupled, from a long-term rate of 100 prisoners per 100,000 residents in the mid-twentieth century to a high of 527 per 100,000 in 2007. The fi rst half of the imprisonment boom coincided with similarly sharp increases in the rate of violent crime in the United States (O’Hear, 2017, xvi). However, crime rates have consistently fallen since the early 1990s. Still, even as crime rates dropped, imprisonment rates continued to climb for another decade and a half. This combination of a steadily declining crime rate and a steadily increasing imprisonment rate provides strong evidence that the U.S. criminal justice system became signifi cantly tougher in the 1990s and early 2000s. There are many actors in the system that could have contributed to this increased toughness, including (1) police offi cers, who decide whom to arrest (2) prosecutors, who decide whether and how to charge the indi- viduals who have been arrested (3) judges, who decide how to sentence convicted defendants (4) parole boards, which decide in many states when exactly sentenced defendants will be released from prison and (5) community supervision agents, who decide whether convicted