Latest issue of Federal Sentencing Reporter now (partially freely) available

This new latest issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter includes a number of pieces on alternatives to incarceration, which I have described as a topic that seems at once forgotten and yet ever-present in the federal sentencing system.  FSR's publishers have graciaiously agree to make some of the materials in this new issue free to download for a limited time.  Since I help edit FSR, I view all the pieces in this new issue as "must reads," though folks may be especially interested in FSR's reprinting of notable speeches by US Sentencing Commission Chair Judge Carlton W. Reeves and BOP director Colette Peters which were delivered at the Center for Justice and Human Dignity’s October 2023 Summit “Rewriting the Sentence II.”

My brief introduction to this FSR issue, which is titled "A New Alternatives Agenda for the U.S. Sentencing Commission?," starts this way:

Data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission indicate that over a third of all sentenced federal defendants have no criminal history and that the vast majority of federal sentencings are for nonviolent offenses.  These realities might lead one to expect a significant number of federal sentences to involve alternatives to imprisonment, particularly given Congress’s instruction to the Commission that the sentence guidelines should ‘‘reflect the general appropriateness of imposing a sentence other than imprisonment in cases in which the defendant is a first offender who has not been convicted of a crime of violence or an otherwise serious offense.’’  But, in fact, over nine of every ten federal sentences involve a term of imprisonment; nearly all federal sentencings focuses on how long a defendant will be sent to prison, not whether he could be adequately punished without imprisonment.