Shocking Sentences

Harsh recidivist sentencing penalties, like three-strikes laws, have been criticized heavily among both academics and practitioners on a number of different grounds. Most arguments focus on how sentences arising from these penalties are disproportionate—that there is no sensible relationship between the wrong committed and the sentence imposed. Those critiques are valid, but there’s another important problem with recidivist sentencing penalties that has been overlooked: they lead to sentences that are totally unexpected—indeed, shocking—to the defendants who face them. Many recidivist sentencing penalties cause large leaps in sentencing exposure that amount to exponential growth when compared with a defendant’s prior sentences. We can better understand the problem of shocking sentences (and how to solve it) by understanding the psychological phenomenon that likely causes it: the exponential growth bias. Across a number of domains, people making quantitative decisions tend to presume linear growth will occur, even in light of evidence that the growth is exponential. I argue that this phenomenon happens in sentencing as well, and explains—at least in part—why defendants don’t anticipate these types of sentences. Understanding the psychological underpinning of shocking sentences helps us understand why they are harmful: they undermine due process and predictability in the law, they limit potential deterrence, and they’re out of line with everyday intuitions about sentencing. Flatly, they’re bad sentencing policy, and we should reduce them or eliminate them outright. But even if eliminating shocking sentences is politically untenable, there may be ways to reduce the effect of the exponential growth bias. Applying lessons learned from the psychological literature, I suggest ways to provide increased notice of recidivist sentencing provisions aimed to make them less shocking.