The first section of the paper provides the background information necessary to understand the guidelines and the task the Federal Sentencing Commission faced when it drafted the guidelines. This background discussion compares State and Federal guidelines, states the purposes of the guidelines, summarizes how the guidelines work, and notes the two basic principles that guided the commission in the drafting of the guidelines (past sentencing practice and the evolutionary character of sentencing guidelines). The second section discusses the key compromises involved in the development of the guidelines. Procedural versus substantive justice was one area of compromise. This concerned the competing rationales underlying a "real offense" sentencing system and a "charge offense" system. A second compromise was forced on the commission by the fact that the criminal justice system is an administrative system and must therefore be administratively workable. A third compromise was reflected in the philosophical premises upon which the commission rested its concept of the guidelines. It was a compromise forced on the commission by the institutional nature of the group-guidelines writing process. A fourth area of compromise involved more traditional "trade-offs" among commissioners with differing viewpoints. The fifth kind of compromise emerges from the "intractable sentencing problem," notably sentencing for multiple counts. The sixth area of compromise concerns problems endemic to the criminal justice system; one example, is whether or not to include in the guidelines a distinction between sentencing for offenders who plead guilty and those who plead not guilty but are subsequently found guilty following a trial. This paper notes that only a few of the compromises the commission made involved a conscious effort to reconcile politically-based differences among commissioners. Appended sections of the sentencing guidelines and the guidelines manual and 147 footnotes