1980s: the heyday of mandatory sentences
The switch from indeterminate to determinate federal sentencing occurred in 1984 when Congress enacted the Comprehensive Crime Control Act and its sister provision, the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. These laws phased out parole and established the U.S. Sentencing Commission to develop Judge Frankel's original concept of an unprecedented body of laws to regulate all federal sentencing: the federal sentencing guidelines.
Guidelines were conceived as a middle ground between mandatory sentences and complete indeterminate sentencing. A Senate report on them emphasized the need to curtail judicial sentencing discretion, but stressed that the guidelines were not intended to be imposed "in a mechanistic fashion."12 The purpose, the report stated, is "to provide a structure for evaluating the fairness and appropriateness of the sentence for an individual offender," but not to "remove all of the judge's discretion."
Sentencing schemes in four states that relied on statutorily mandated sentences were discussed and rejected as being too rigid. As Sen. John V. Tunney (D-Calif.) said in 1975 in introducing one of the precursor bills of the Sentencing Reform Act, "An inflexible scheme is hardly an improvement on an arbitrary one."13
But the appearance of a rational evolution of sentencing policy was fleeting. In the same comprehensive crime bill that contained the sentencing guidelines and a new approach to sentencing, Congress also included significant new mandatory minimums, harbingers of what has become the most sweeping regime of mandatory punishments in the nation's history.
The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 created a mandatory five-year sentence for using or carrying a gun during a crime of violence or a drug crime (on top of the sentence for the violence itself), and a mandatory 15-year sentence for simple possession of a firearm by a person with three previous state or federal convictions for burglary or robbery. Nowhere in the legislative history was any irony or inconsistency with the Sentencing Reform Act noted.