Punishment—the pain and suffering associated with particular criminal legal sanctions-is central to criminal justice policy. Yet, there is a paucity of studies on the totality of legal sanctions, including the sum of all court-issued sentences, and the punishment that they produce. The gap is striking given that the totality of sanction-related punishment is central to crime and justice policy goals. These center around how society should respond to crime and include retributive and utilitarian goals, including deterrence. Despite advances in scholarship on sentencing, conceptual confusion remains about the relative punishment produced by criminal legal sanctions and, by extension, the totality of related punishment. We present a conceptual framework for estimating the totality of legal sanctions and the punishment associated with them, and then discuss implications of this framework for estimating the punishment associated with all legal sanctions. Then we elaborate on the implications of the framework both for evaluating the extent to which legal sanctions achieve retributive or crime-deterrent goals and for efforts to place criminal justice policy on an evidence-based foundation.
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