Samuel J. Barrows Gives Reasons For
Favoring the Indeterminate Sentence
For Convicted Criminals.
Times and conditions have changed since Dickens and Charles Reade aroused
the English-speaking world by revealing the inhuman abuses of the English
prison system. To-day humane treatment is taken as a matter of course. The
chief aim of the modern criminologist is not to punish the criminal but
to cure him; and in curing him the first agency is fair treatment.
Therefore is urged the necessity of making the penalty more nearly fit the
crime.
According to Samuel J. Barrows, president of the International Prison
Congress, "it is still more difficult to make the penalty fit the
offender." In a recent article in the _Outlook_, he enters a plea for
safeguarding the "indeterminate sentence" for convicted criminals. The
best criminal code, he says, is an arbitrary instrument, and it is
impossible, on any principle, so to construct one that the penalty and
crime are commensurate. After making this assertion, he continues:
No legislator can show why the theft of twenty-five dollars
should be punishable with one year's imprisonment, and the
theft of twenty-six dollars with five years' imprisonment.
Nor is the difficulty removed by empowering the judge to use
his discretion in imposing sentence within certain limits of
minimum and maximum. A judge would find it hard to tell why
he sentenced one boy five years for stealing a dollar and
another boy one year for stealing two hundred dollars, or
another judge why he sent one boy to prison for a year, and
another, a first offender, to sixteen years for the same
offense. A study of codes on one hand and of sentences on
another reveals an amazing amount of contradiction and
confusion, not to say rank injustice, in the application of
penalties. For this inequality and injustice the
indeterminate sentence furnishes the necessary relief.
Instead of making the code-maker or the judge decide when a
man shall come out of prison, it puts the main
responsibility of deciding that question upon the prisoner
himself.