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Reformers, exhorters, Christian Endeavorers, humanitarians, Salvation Armies, social reformers, penologists, scientific experimentalists with surgical apparatus, together with parole laws, indeterminate sentences, commutations, pardons, not to speak of a good warden here and there and a kind guard all toiling and tinkering to make prisons better, to sweep them, to air them, to instil religion and education, to supply work and exercise and to pay wages and all the while the tide of criminals gets larger and the accommodations for them less adequate.
There is also, I fancy, a shaping notion in the public mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prison has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at home.
There is, I fancy, a shaping notion in the observant mind that the penologists and their allies have gone about as far as they can safely be permitted to go in the direction of a softer suasion of the criminal nature toward good behavior. The modern prison has become a rather more comfortable habitation than the dangerous classes are accustomed to at home.
A considerable and increasing group of penologists is pressing upon our legislatures the extension of the principle of the "indeterminate sentence" by removing the limit of a minimum term. It is doubtful if such a change would satisfy the constitutional requirement of a trial by jury. That in its nature involves a trial before a judge and a sentence imposed by the court upon the verdict.
"Well, you may be surprised to know that they're not all so bitter. Once in a long while I get a kind word. That bill I got through the assembly separating hardened criminals from those susceptible of reform the indeterminate sentence law was praised by penologists all over the country. It's all in the day's work; sometimes you're patted on the back and the next time they kick you down stairs.
The Director of the Psychopathic Institute of the Juvenile Court in Chicago has, however, not only avoided this danger but has given psychologists, jurists, and penologists such a report of his five years work as not one of them can afford to overlook. As the title of the work implies, the material is drawn from the individual study of the delinquent.
Exemplary punishment is, undoubtedly, still necessary in some cases, and in the main it should be reserved for this class of mature offenders in society who have otherwise lived reputable lives. Just how far exemplary punishment should be used in society as a deterrent to crime is a disputed question among penologists.
Meanwhile, scores of animated humanitarians, penologists, criminologists, theorists and idealists have consulted, resolved, recommended, and agitated, striking hard but in the dark, and most of their blows going wide.
"The very fact that we can be sentenced to such long terms for a political offense shows that there does exist, in fact, a group of people who have come into conflict with state power for dissenting from the prevailing political system," our representatives answered. We cited definitions of political offenses by eminent criminologists, penologists, sociologists, statesmen and historians.
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