Assessments of the severity scales of penalties handed down by criminal courts have not been well researched. This paper suggests that the public as well as court actors incorporate a sensitivity to over-punishment that is not manifest in the scales of the perceived seriousness of crimes. It also suggests that aggregate measures of severity scales are not appropriate because neither the public nor the court actors agree on the underlying measurements of these scales. This paper demonstrates that some scales are more consistent than others and produce more reasonable exchange rates between prison and non-prison penalties (such as fines, probation, or community work). One interesting finding is that the public exhibits equal “expertise” in penal metric as sentencing professionals (judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, or probation officers). This paper also discusses the implications for sentencing guidelines of intermediate penalties.