THE PUNISHMENT TO FIT THE OFFENDER.
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.