In the past quarter-century, incarceration rates have risen precipitously and racial disparity has deepened, with African Americans experiencing an incarceration rate seven times that for Whites. This is particularly striking when criminal processing "reforms" meant to attenuate discriminatory disparities in punishment outcomes were enacted in every state and at the federal level during the 1980s and 1990s. To understand how and why these "determinate sentencing" policies failed to achieve their desired effect, I examine the effects of mandatory terms, sentencing enhancements, parole abolition, and truth-in-sentencing statutes on individual-level sentence length and time served using data on criminal justice policies collected from current and past state criminal codes and data on sentence length and time from the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP).