Level Up!

The first half of 2026 saw lots of action at state sentencing commissions

The National Association of Sentencing Commissions will hold its annual conference in Albuquerque this week. The theme of the conference, Level Up, is a call to meet the challenges of a changing landscape in sentencing and the larger criminal justice system. The organizers have defined “leveling up” to include, “(1) Establishing or reviving a sentencing commission or equivalent agency; (2) Improving data analysis and deliverables, including communication between criminal justice data stakeholders; (3) Expanding the provision of non-partisan policy analysis; or (4) Enhancing the relationship between policymakers and stakeholders, especially as it relates to the inclusion of input from those with lived experience.” Speakers at the conference will discuss these themes and lead professional development sessions on what it takes to run a commission, how to develop research partnerships, and running effective reentry programs of various kinds.

The conference themes and agenda emanate from what’s been happening at state sentencing commissions this past year. The last six months in particular have seen state commissions reviving, reviewing, and re-ranking guideline systems. The Albuquerque gathering arrives at a moment when the state-level project of guiding sentencing courts in the exercise of their discretion has been productive but at the same time faces longstanding challenges.

The most literal answer to the conference’s “establish or revive” call comes out of Michigan, and it is the single most striking commission story of the year so far. On May 7^th, the Michigan Sentencing Commission held its first meeting since 1997 — a gap of nearly three decades. The body has an unusual institutional history. It was created in 1994, did its work, and then effectively went dark in 1997 once the legislature enacted the guidelines it had recommended, leaving the state with a sentencing structure but no standing institution to tend it.

Lawmakers reconstituted the commission under Public Acts 273 and 274 of 2024, this time as a nonpartisan advisory body housed within the Legislative Council. Governor Gretchen Whitmer named Court of Appeals Judge Christopher Yates as its chair. Yates framed the Commission’s reason for existing in the plainest possible terms: offenders with nearly identical crimes and criminal histories can wind up with dramatically different sentences, an outcome he called antithetical to the very idea of a guideline system.

What Michigan has set for itself in its first year is worth watching, because it is a catalogue of the problems that accumulate when a guideline system runs for a generation without tending. The Commission has said it will clarify the confusing “offense variable” language that has generated conflicting appellate decisions, revisit criminal-history scoring so that it better accounts for repeat offenders, adapt the guidelines to the state’s changed treatment of drug offenses and the decriminalization of marijuana, and improve the guidelines governing criminal sexual conduct. The Commission staff has obtained felony sentencing data back to 2003 from the Michigan Department of Corrections, and the focus of its work over the next year will be making a series of research presentations to the Commission that describe the accumulated problems in detail and then begin to develop policy responses to them. The membership of the Commission is deliberately broad — legislators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and members who have themselves been incarcerated — and the Commission is required to report annually to the legislature, the governor, and the state supreme court in December.

If Michigan is the revival story, Minnesota is the story of a mature commission doing the hard work of a top-to-bottom review. The Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission — the oldest such body in the country, operating since 1978 — has just completed its first comprehensive review of the guidelines in the system’s history. In a 10-to-1 vote, the commission adopted a package of changes and submitted them to the legislature; absent legislative rejection, they took effect August 1. The substance is significant, and it concentrates on the criminal-history score, the engine that drives much of the disparity the guidelines were meant to constrain.

The Commission cut the felony “decay” period from fifteen years to ten, so that older convictions drop out of the calculation sooner. It converted custody status from a component of the criminal-history score into a durational modifier, changing how the fact of being on probation or supervision at the time of an offense is counted. It eliminated juvenile points from the score altogether. And it simplified the treatment of prior DWIs and other gross misdemeanors. Taken together, these adjustments reflect a considered judgment that the criminal-history axis was in need of significant reform. The Commission has paired the changes with a run of practitioner trainings this fall, including a set of August “Lunch and Learn” sessions, a reminder that adopting a guideline change and successfully landing it in courtrooms are two different tasks.

Kansas shows the same reformist impulse, and it illustrates the conference’s second theme — better data and policy analysis. On May 19, the Kansas Sentencing Commission announced that Arnold Ventures had agreed to fund the policy component of what it is billing as the most comprehensive review of the Kansas guidelines since they were created. The funding is anticipated to reach up to $600,000 over twenty-four months, with technical assistance from the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center. Executive Director Scott Schultz and Research Director Dr. Carmen Diaz prepared the application, and the stated aim is squarely practical: to identify policy options that would slow projected prison-population growth and stabilize corrections spending, with findings timed to inform the legislature’s 2028 session.

The philanthropic-plus-technical-assistance model on display here — a national funder underwriting the analytic capacity of a state commission — is precisely the kind of capacity-building the Albuquerque program is designed to encourage. Kansas has also been minding the less visible infrastructure of its work, completing the statewide rollout of its KSApp criminal-justice filing tool across all thirty-one judicial districts and seating new commission members over the summer. The law making KSApp mandatory for all felony sentencings passed unanimously and was signed by the governor. As of July 1^st, KSApp is the statewide tool for filing sentencing pleadings, including presentence investigation (PSI) reports and sentencing and probation revocation journal entries.

The busiest commission calendars belonged to Connecticut and the District of Columbia, and both offer a useful corrective to the assumption that commission work is mostly the periodic publication of a manual. The Connecticut Sentencing Commission ran a dense schedule of full-commission, committee, and working-group meetings from January through May. In February it took up an outcomes report on Public Act 15-84 and a proposal to expand residential mental-health treatment beds; in April it turned to a substantial report on intellectual and developmental disabilities in the criminal-justice system, along with an early screening and intervention initiative. A pretrial working group met repeatedly through the spring and produced a summary report analyzing failure-to-appear rates, the pretrial detention of people charged with low-level felonies, and violations of protective orders. In June the commission adopted revised bylaws, retiring a version that had stood since 2016 — the sort of quiet governance housekeeping that rarely makes news but signals an institution taking its own structure seriously.

The District of Columbia Sentencing Commission, for its part, made several changes to its guidelines. Alongside releasing its 2025 annual report in late April and issuing a Spanish translation of its 2026 voluntary guidelines manual, the Commission ranked three previously unranked felony offenses and re-ranked three Title 48 drug offenses, moving them from the main grid to the drug grid. This is the routine but consequential maintenance work of a guideline system — deciding where a given offense sits in the matrix of seriousness.

Beneath these headline stories runs a steadier current of guideline maintenance that, in the aggregate, is its own kind of “leveling up” (perhaps better characterized as “change and continuity”). Pennsylvania spent the spring rolling out its Eighth Edition sentencing guidelines and the supporting apparatus around them, including the first volume of a new “Compendium” of reference handbooks and a refreshed set of public data dashboards covering 2015 through 2024. Utah promulgated new 2026 sentencing and release guidelines, effective in May, revised to reflect legislative changes, and published an annual accounting of how the year’s legislative session reshaped its master list of offenses — by its own count, forty-four new offenses created in a single session. Arkansas issued its 2026 benchbook, the annually revised presumptive-standards manual its practitioners depend on. None of these is dramatic on its own. Together they describe a working system in which commissions serve as the connective tissue between the laws legislatures enact and what actually happens at sentencing — translating statutes into usable grids, worksheets, and manuals.

Which brings us back to New Mexico. It spent the year modeling the analytic role the meeting will celebrate. During the state’s 2026 legislative session, the New Mexico Sentencing Commission published a bill tracker following criminal-penalty legislation, and lawmakers directed the commission to work with the Legislative Finance Committee on a method for measuring the fiscal impact of bills that change criminal penalties. That last item is quietly telling. It is a legislature asking its sentencing commission not to advocate but to count — to build the analytic infrastructure that lets policymakers see the downstream cost of a penalty change before they vote on it. That is part of the core of what a modern sentencing commission is for.

Read as a whole, the past six months suggest that the state commissions are, in fact, leveling up — some by coming back from the dead, some by rebuilding the criminal-history scores at the heart of their systems, and some by chasing the funding and analytic capacity that serious policy work requires. The commissions that will gather in Albuquerque are not a monolith; they range from Minnesota’s half-century-old institution to Michigan’s freshly resurrected one to bodies with dense committee calendars. And if the theme of this year’s meeting is an instruction, it is also a reminder that a good part of the field is already following it.