Hugo Black

“ The device of probation grew out of a realization that to make the punishment fit the criminal requires wisdom seldom available immediately after conviction. Imposition of sentence at that time is much too often an obligation to exercise caprice, and to make convicted persons serve such a sentence is apt to make law a collaborator in new anti-social consequences. Probation is an experimental device serving both society and the offender. ”

“ But to set a man at large after conviction on condition of his good behavior and on default of such condition to incarcerate him, is neither to try him twice nor to punish him twice. If Congress sees fit, as it has seen fit, to employ such a system of criminal justice there is nothing in the Constitution to hinder. ”

“ In no way does it impair the Act's usefulness as an instrument to accomplish the basic purpose of probation, namely to provide an individualized program offering a young or unhardened offender an opportunity to rehabilitate himself without institutional confinement under the tutelage of a probation official and under the continuing power of the court to impose institutional punishment for his original offense in the event that he abuse this opportunity. ”

“ To vest in courts the power of adjusting the consequences of criminal conduct to the character and capacity of an offender, as revealed by a testing period of probation, of course does not offend the safeguard of the Fifth Amendment against double punishment. By forbidding that no person shall 'be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb', that Amendment guarded against the repetition of history by trying a man twice in a new and independent case when he already had been tried once, see Holmes, J., in Kepner v. ”

“ To treat the pronouncement of a term sentence as a kind of bargain whereby the probationer knows that, no matter what, he cannot be put in prison beyond the term so named is to give a wholly unreal interpretation to the procedure. ”

“ Like the bills before Congress, the state probation acts were not uniform in their treatment of suspension of sentence.↑ Ibid., 105.↑ In 1940 administration of the probation system was transferred to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts under the provisions of an Act passed August 7, 1939. ”

“ A.C. 322, and has led to suggestions for more scientific methods of sentencing, see Smith, Alfred E., Progressive Democracy (1928) 209 et seq; Warner and Cabot, Judges and Law Reform (1936) 156 et seq.; Cantor, Crime and Society (1939) 254 et seq.; Glueck, Criminal Careers in Retrospect (1943) c. ”