More like "The Bad Science of Sentencing". You don't turn people back from bad behavior by telling them you believe they're likely to continue; that's a self-fulfilling prophecy-in-the-making. This is terribly stupid and evil. Instead, if you have reason to suspect people will fall back into crime, take the enormous amounts of money that would be spent on keeping them locked up longer, and invest that in, oh: jobs programs, training, therapy... Things that have a chance of benefiting society in the long term, instead of further degrading people and making the situation worse.
Criminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record. In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future.
Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes. As early as next year, judges there could receive statistically derived tools known as risk assessments to help them decide how much prison time — if any — to assign.