Prison, Individualized Treatment, and the Scientific Basis of Crime

Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight in 1867 prepared the first comprehensive survey of prisons in the United States. Their Report on the Prisons and Reformatories concluded that "there was no prison system in the United States . . . which would not be found wanting."³¹ Prisons, Wines and Dwight argued, had failed to fulfill the optimistic promise held out for them by prewar reformers. They trumpeted a new round of institutional reform that began three years later at the National Conference of Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline in Cincinnati.

The Cincinnati Congress was the most important event in the history of penology in the United States. Organized by Enoch Wines, the convention covered virtually every major issue of prison reform. Particularly influential was a paper by Zebulon R. Brockway, then superintendent of the Detroit House of Corrections, and in 1877 warden of the Elmira Reformatory, the model penal institution of the late nineteenth century.

Brockway advocated the indeterminate sentence and individualized treatment within an institutional setting. He affirmed the traditional role of the prison in imposing new habits through rigorous discipline, agreeing with antebellum penal reformers that religious instruction, secular education, and hard labor were essential to rehabilitation. Brockway, however, placed far more stress than earlier reformers on individualized treatment. He believed that existing sentencing practices, by establishing a foreseeable period of detention, gave inmates little incentive to improve and operated, in any case, on the false premise that each person could be rehabilitated in the same amount of time. According to Brockway, who favored sentences with no maximums or minimums, indeterminate sentences were essential for one simple reasons: the offender had complete control over his or her improvement.

Brockway's insistence on an individualized approach to the rehabilitation of criminals had broad appeal, not just to reformers, but also to lawmakers and prison administrators. The former believed that Brockway's plan would make existing facilities work better without significant additional costs. The latter embraced the greater discretionary control that the indeterminate sentence promised. Wardens, for example, could coerce cooperation from recalcitrant prisoners by certifying that they were not making acceptable progress toward rehabilitation.

Science lent credibility to the new emphasis on individualized treatment. At the same time that the eugenics movement was stimulating a reassessment of the law of

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race relations and the family, the research of an Italian army physician, Cesare Lombroso and an American, Richard L. Dugdale, were reshaping assumptions about crime, criminal law, and institutions.

Lombroso developed the science of anthropometry, which means the study and techniques of human comparison. His ideas were set forth in The Criminal Man ( 1876), in which he purported to show, through systematic measurements, that criminals were invariably "born" as biological "throwbacks" to an earlier and lower form of life. He concluded that there were several categories of criminals (born criminals criminals governed by passions, criminals who acted only occasionally) and that each of them bore distinctive physical characteristics. Black and frizzled hair, a sparse beard, oblique eyes, a small skull, a retreating forehead, and voluminous ears were all evidence of inherited criminality.

Dugdale also drew his inspiration from the science of heredity, and his "The Jukes": A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity ( 1877) became a popular sensation. Dugdale found that since the seventeenth century one Ada Jukes had produced offspring whose numbers included habitual thieves, murderers, and prostitutes. Dugdale's study lent the then-accepted standards of science to the proposition that a bad seed, once planted genetically, would echo through generations of criminals.

Sorting out those individuals who bore the mark of Cain from those who did not was one of the reasons for adopting an individualized approach to criminal rehabilitation. The prison remained at the center of the rehabilitation process, but lawmakers added enough new elements in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to forge the outlines of a genuine correctional system. These included probation, parole, revised sentencing practices, plea bargaining, and the juvenile court.

Probation

Probation provides that an offender can be freed to the community as long as he or she meets certain specified conditions. The practice filled many of the idealized goals of the Cincinnati Congress, and it had a long common law history. First English and later American judges had given suspended sentences to criminal offenders deemed good risks, on the provision that, should they fail to maintain their good behavior, they would have to serve the full term of their sentence.

Massachusetts in 1878 was the first state to enact a probation statute. The legislature formalized what had been a long-standing informal practice. John Augustus, a Boston shoemaker, began functioning as a volunteer probation officer in 1841. Augustus visited criminal courts and took up the causes of those individuals he believed capable of redemption. He was apparently motivated by a sense of compassion, paying fines for drunks, posting bail for indigent offenders, and even helping to find employment for the charges he took under his wing. The Boston criminal court eventually took official notice of Augustus's activities; judges assigned convicted offenders to his care instead of committing them to correctional institutions. The exact number of persons aided by Augustus is in dispute, but he asserted that by 1858 he had served some 1152 men and 794 women.

The Massachusetts statute was a model for the rest of the nation. It authorized probation officers for Suffolk County ( Boston) only, but in 1880 the legislature extended this provision to the entire state. As in most other states, the probation officer,

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though originally controlled by municipal officials, was subsequently placed under the supervision of the courts. By 1900 four other states ( Missouri, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Vermont) had established probation systems.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 891