The Criminal's "Debt" to Society Overpaid
That a suspended sentence should be of greater value in bringing about the reformation of a criminal than a prison term is, I believe, reasonable and logical. When the criminal has served his sentence, his supposed debt to society is paid. If he commits another crime, he does so with the chance, in his favor, of a possible acquittal, a "hung" jury, a light sentence, or a reversal upon appeal. He is consequently willing to take risks which he would not take were the consequences sure and severe. The most important element in the defendant's reformation, however, is his avoidance of the physical, mental, and moral injury which he would suffer by serving his prison sentence. In these days, when practically every applicant for a position must present references of previous service, a prison term means ruin. If at the end of his term he is reformed, his reformation is of no value in obtaining employment. Prison sentences did not have this effect a hundred years ago, but times have changed. Every released convict is a shrinking coward, fearful that each person he meets knows his record. The new, plain suit of clothes he is given upon leaving prison is worn only until he can find a secondhand clothing store where it may be exchanged for something less good, but clothed in which he will have a trifle less fear of identification. If he succeeds in getting employment by changing his name and concealing his past, he lives in mortal terror lest his deception be discovered.
It is a fundamental principle of the law that no man can be punished more than once for the same offense. His "debt" to society is presumed to be conclusively paid when his term of imprisonment expires; and yet under present conditions his real punishment is then only beginning. I have just finished reading a twenty-three-page letter from an ex-convict, who eighteen years ago completed a seven months' term. He tells in a simple and pathetic fashion of his efforts to escape from his prison record, but time and time again, just as he had won the confidence of his employer, some one happened along who "gave him away," and then he was obliged to move and try it again. Never, during all this time, has he dared to attempt to vote, or take any part in public or social affairs. Surely a fearful penance for one violation of the law, especially when we know that thousands of wealthy and influential lawbreakers are never punished!
If an ex-convict has a family, he returns from prison to find them impoverished, shunned by their neighbors, his children scorned and sneered at by their schoolmates—everything worse, more helpless, than when he left them. All of this, and much more, is escaped by the man under a suspended sentence; his capital is unimpaired, and by "making good" his record will be cleared.
That many, perhaps a majority, of criminals can be wholly reformed without imprisonment, through the means of a suspended maximum sentence, with little or no expense to the State, I am satisfied beyond a doubt; and this will be done when we can eliminate from the treatment of criminals the desire for revenge and look only to the good of the individual and of society.