About District Sentencing
District Sentencing is an independent public-data reference site. It aggregates the United States Sentencing Commission's individual offender datafiles (524,421 cases sentenced across FY2018–FY2025) into figures for each of the 94 federal judicial districts, the 12 circuits, the Commission's 30 primary offence types and 57 Chapter Two guidelines: median and mean prison terms, the share of sentences within, below and above the guideline range, sentence-length distributions, criminal history categories and the trend by fiscal year. Each figure is placed beside its circuit and the nation so it can be read in context.
What it is for
Practitioners on both sides of a federal case, law students, reporters, policy researchers and families trying to understand what a charge has carried in a particular district use the same Commission files. The Commission's own Sourcebook presents national and district tables one at a time; this site adds the cross-tabulations by offence type, the district-to-district comparisons and the year-by-year series that the published tables do not offer.
What it leaves out
- Cases and people. The site holds no case-level records. Every figure is a count, a share or a median over a group, and any group with fewer than 10 cases is hidden or pooled. The Commission's files carry no names, and this site never republishes a row from them.
- Judges. The Commission does not release judge identities and this site publishes nothing about individual judges. There are no judge pages and no judge comparisons.
- Predictions and advice. Aggregates of past sentences do not estimate the outcome of any case. The site does not say what a sentence "will" or "should" be, and it is not legal advice.
- Opinion. Districts are not ranked as strict or lenient; differences between them are described in the Commission's terms and read alongside the offence mix that drives most of them.
Funding
The site is free to use and is funded by advertising that is clearly labelled as such. Advertisers have no influence over which figures appear or how they are presented, and no sponsor content is carried.
Updates and corrections
The Commission publishes each fiscal year's datafile the following spring; the site is rebuilt when a new year appears and its snapshots are refreshed. If a figure here differs from the Commission's published tables, the Commission's figures are authoritative; see corrections and the methodology for the definitions that can make the two differ.
Contact: contact page.