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Parole and the Indeterminate Sentence

Parole is the practice by which inmates are released after having satisfied certain conditions. The assumption is that parole offers an incentive for good behavior, one that motivates prisoners to hasten their own rehabilitation. The indeterminate sentence provides that convicted offenders are incarcerated until such time as they demonstrate that they are capable of reentering society. No state adopted open-ended sentencing; instead, state legislatures rewrote the punishment portions of criminal statutes, requiring that convicts had to be released after they reached the maximum term of years under their sentence.

Discretionary early release of prisoners was well established in both England and the United States before the Cincinnati Congress. Captain Alexander Maconochie, who in 1840 became superintendent of the penal colony on Norfolk Island in Northeastern Australia, is usually called the father of parole. Maconochie's plan was subsequently adopted by Sir Walter Grofton, director of Irish Convict Prisons, whose work was well known to Americans. Grofton invented the "ticket of leave" program through which prisoners moved up grade by grade until they finally earned permission to leave.

Lawmakers after the Civil War also drew on their own experiences. For example, delinquent children placed in houses of refuge had gained early release through apprenticeship. In adult prisons, wardens devised programs that rewarded well-behaved prisoners by reducing their sentences. The pardoning power, by which a governor intervened to release a prisoner before his or her sentence ran its course, was pervasive. In Massachusetts between 1828 and 1866, 12.5 percent of all prisoners were released by pardon. The practice made administrative sense (as did parole and discretionary release under indeterminate sentences) because it abated overcrowding, placing the most deserving convicts on the streets while making room for more dangerous and recently convicted felons. New York in 1817 was the first state to have a "good time" or commutation law that reduced sentences of inmates serving more than five years by as much as 25 percent. By 1869 twenty-three states had some form of commutation law.

Brockway campaigned to make conditional release a formal part of the U.S. correctional system. After becoming warden of the Elmira Reformatory in 1877, he made that institution into a national model. Supported by legislation that imposed a modified form of the indeterminate sentence, Brockway introduced a grading system that allowed prisoners to lower their sentences by earning credits for good behavior.

By 1900 eleven states had some form of indeterminate sentence and another twenty states had some form of parole. The sentencing statutes varied widely, and they had somewhat contradictory effects. Legislatures specified longer maximum penalties and inmates spent somewhat longer periods of time behind bars than they had under the old sentencing system. Most prisoners won release before they completed their maximum sentence, but overcrowded facilities rather than massive rehabilitation dictated the release of those inmates who had served the longest terms.

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Date: 2015-01-29; view: 785


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