Cite as: 519 U. S. 433 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
the Ex Post Facto Clause: whether the cancellation of 1,860 days of accumulated provisional credits had the effect of lengthening petitioner's period of incarceration.
In our post-Weaver cases, we have also considered whether the legislature's action lengthened the sentence without examining the purposes behind the original sentencing scheme. In Miller v. Florida, 482 U. S. 423 (1987), we unanimously concluded that a revision in Florida's sentencing guidelines that went into effect between the date of petitioner's offense and the date of his conviction violated the Ex Post Facto Clause. Our determination that the new guideline was " 'more onerous than the prior law,' " id., at 431 (quoting Dobbert v. Florida, 432 U. S. 282, 294 (1977)), rested entirely on an objective appraisal of the impact of the change on the length of the offender's presumptive sentence. 482 U. S., at 431 ("Looking only at the change in primary offense points, the revised guidelines law clearly disadvantages petitioner and similarly situated defendants").
In California Dept. of Corrections v. Morales, 514 U. S. 499 (1995), we also relied entirely on objective considerations to support our conclusion that an amendment to California's parole procedures that decreased the frequency of parole hearings for certain offenders had not made any "change in the 'quantum of punishment,' " id., at 508. The amendment at issue in Morales allowed the parole board, after holding an initial parole hearing, to defer for up to three years subsequent parole suitability hearings for prisoners convicted of multiple murders if the board found that it was unreasonable to expect that parole would be granted at a hearing during the subsequent years. We stated that the relevant inquiry is whether the "change alters the definition of criminal conduct or increases the penalty by which a crime is punishable." Id., at 507, n. 3.14 After making that inquiry, we
14 Later in the opinion we restated the test in similar language: "In evaluating the constitutionality of the 1981 amendment, we must determine whether it produces a sufficient risk of increasing the measure of punish-
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