FEDERAL PAROLE.
The Attorney-General, Geo. W. Wickersham, delivered an able address on the “Federal Parole,” now in operation at the various federal prisons of the country.
“Punishment in some form is still necessary to prevent crime. This is especially the case,” he added, “in a community and at a time when divers economic forces are struggling with each other for the mastery in the state, and where laws are enacted through the influence of one class or classes to control the action of another class who are unwilling to accept them as rules of action, because unconvinced of the wisdom or justice of the legislative policy which they embody. Yet a consideration of the nature of social organization will demonstrate the absolute necessity of all classes of society conforming to requirements prescribed by the duly constituted authorities—however wise or unwise those regulations may appear to those whose conduct is sought to be controlled by them. But within its constitutional scope the acts of the legislature stand until repealed as the mandate of organized society, and the continued effectiveness of organized society requires that obedience to such laws be compelled.”
The attorney-general lengthily discussed the broad question of punishment for crime and the administration of the federal parole law.
Modern penal legislation, he said, is based on a recognition of the expediency of endeavoring to reform the criminal, and so great a stress has been laid on that feature in dealing with criminals, that “we sometimes forget that in order that punishment may act as a deterrent upon others it must appear as a badge of disgrace, and not simply the bestowal of benevolence.”
Mr. Wickersham favored the extension of the parole law to include life prisoners. He regarded as an incongruity that prisoners sentenced to long terms for vicious crimes should be eligible for parole, when the man convicted of second degree murder must remain in prison for life.
“If the lawmaking power,” continued Mr. Wickersham, “considers reformation, conditional liberation and reinstatement to a normal position in society possible in these cases, ‘it is difficult to say on what principle the same possibility and hope of reformation, liberation and forgiveness should not be extended to one guilty of murder under circumstances not punishable by death. While there is life there should be hope. It may be far off, delayed, a dim, distant possibility, but it would seem that that hope should be held out as a possible attainment to the meanest wretch who is allowed to live. The justice of man should aim at the perfection of divine justice, and though finite wisdom not knowing the hearts of men, may not always deal justly with offenders, yet it should not “shut the gates of mercy” against the meanest of God’s creatures.’”
Since the parole law was placed in operation last autumn, the attorney-general said, but one prisoner had violated his parole. The 200 prisoners who were paroled from the time the law was put into effect in the autumn of 1910 to June 30, earned nearly $22,000, whereas, if they had remained in prison, the attorney-general pointed out, they would have been a charge on the government.
Mr. Wickersham expressed the belief that the parole boards should be enlarged by adding two unofficial persons selected from among prominent citizens of the locality in which the prison is situated.
The Federal Parole Law, approved 1910, provides that any prisoner confined in any United States prison or penitentiary, for a definite term of over one year, whose record of conduct shows that he has observed the rules of such institution, and who has served one third of the time for which he was sentenced, may be released on parole as hereinafter provided.... Nothing in the law is to be so construed as to impair the power of the President to grant a pardon or to commutation in any case, or in any way impair or revoke such good-time allowance as is or may hereafter be provided by Congress.