Serious reform of the legislative component of sentencing requires more than simply adding more sentencing options or consolidating various sentencing provisions into a single statute, such as the Victorian Penalties and Sentences Act of 1985. Sentencing reform requires that a global view be taken of the interrelationships between offenses and penalties, and justice dictates that similar offenses be treated alike in both legislative and judicial arenas. Further, sentencing reform requires that allocations of statutory maxima be made in the context of the criminal sanction system's totality and not in an ad hoc fashion. The task of reclassifying all offenses and sanctions according to their gravity is difficult but necessary. Various approaches to ranking the relative seriousness of criminal conduct and allocating statutory penalties are detailed. A combination of the approaches is applied to 500 offenses in Victoria, both serious and trivial, in order to produce a revised ranking of statutory offenses and to rationalize their accompanying sanctions. 25 references, 24 notes, and 5 tables