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Sentencing Process In Criminal Justice

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In the United States, there are millions of people in United States prisons and jails and millions of people in our probation system. Imagine all those people moving through our criminal Justice system, judges have caseloads after caseloads of work. That is why the criminal justice system has created a process to keep everything running, as it should and assuring that justice is served. There are several different phases in the criminal justice process. Even after the offender is convicted of a crime, the process keeps moving forward. After an offender has been convicted of the crime, in other words, found guilty, he now faces the sentencing phase of the process. During this phase, the offender is brought before the court so that the offender’s …show more content…
Most of the sentencing decisions are left to the judge, at least for the most part. In order to help guide a judge in a sentencing decision there are guidelines that come with the particular law that has been broken down which provides a sentence for the courts. Example, the state law that informs us of what is constitute as assault also tells us that assault comes with a sentence of three to ten years in state prison. There are some states that use a form of sentencing’s called “Determinate sentencing”, all this means is that the judge sentences the offenders to a specific time period, the judge doesn’t have any discretion when sentencing the offender, since the law already dictates for him the precise sentence for that crime. Most states use indeterminate sentence. In indeterminate sentencing, the offender’s sentences are looked upon as a range of time rather then a strict specific range of time. An example would be a sentence of three to ten years for assault; the sentence is not determined and can range depending on severity of the crime, conduct and other key factors. Indeterminate sentencing gives the judge a wide discretion when deciding and giving out a sentence, which is identified as a range of

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