The concepts of dangerousness and incapacitation imply that crime can be controlled by identifying "dangerous" offenders who commit a disproportionate amount of crime and then incapacitating them in an institution to prevent them from committing a large volume of crime. This approach not only overestimates the ability of science to identify the "career" or "dangerous" criminal, but underestimates the impact of factors such as structural racism and social dysfunction in producing a continual supply of offenders. Also, guidelines reforms aggravate the long-term effects of incapacitation through increases in the degree of social control over conventional offenders while ignoring the need for and desirability of developing nonincarcerative alternatives to enhance offender treatment. At a minimum, there should be a better balance between incapacitation and the use of nonincarcerative alternatives. The guidelines' focus on conventional "street" crime neglects retribution to match the social harm caused by corporate and white-collar offenses.