Prison sentence

“ Did the law ever suppose that the court, after having sentenced a man to eight hundred years’ imprisonment, or even to two hundred and eighty years’ imprisonment, should go on, and sentence him to twenty years, or even to seven years more?—when the court must know that it would be imposing sentences to be executed centuries after the prisoner would be dead, and after he would have left his prison, not to return to this world, but to go to another. ”

“ After conviction the natural optimism of the human race reasserts itself and the defendant begins to believe that the worst is, after all, over, and to rely upon the assurances of his counsel or his political friends that the judge is going to be easy on him and give him a light sentence. Terrible is the disappointment of such a one who finds that he is going to be sentenced to State's prison when he expected the penitentiary or to the penitentiary when he expected to be set free entirely under a suspended sentence. ”

“ When I say that every State prison is to be a reformatory, I except, of course, from its operation, those sentenced for life for murder, or other capital offenses, and those who have proved themselves incorrigible by repeated violations of their parole. ”

“ This will give him plenty of time to learn a trade, so that when he goes out of prison he can make a living for himself and for those depending upon him. For crimes that require lighter sentences of imprisonment let jails or reformatories be brought into requisition. In the eyes of the world a jail sentence is not so disgraceful as one in the penitentiary.
The plumage of a jail-bird is not so black as that of a penitentiary bird. The disgrace of being sent to the penitentiary for one year is as great as being sent for five or ten years. ”

“ None will dissent, we presume, from the remark of the inspectors, that “it should be remembered by all those who are intrusted with the high prerogative of administering punishment, that the convict in the prison is sentenced by the law to expiate his crime by confinement and hard labor, and that every degree of punishment beyond what is needful for the due execution of this sentence, and the attainment of the best ends to be answered by it, is excessive, is beyond the sentence and intention of the law, and is without law or justice.” ”

“ Criminals of the worst class—murderers and the like—are not admitted here. Those who have life sentences have no business among those who are going out. About 75 per cent. of the convicts pass through the Intermediate Prison,—the other 25 per cent. consisting of the excluded class and of those whose health, commutation of sentence, or other circumstances interfere. Almost all, however, who are found in that establishment are grave offenders, and old offenders—often punished, but never before in the way of restoration as they are now. ”

“ It is hardly necessary for me to dwell upon my feelings when I received this unexpected sentence. They were of course more interesting to me than to my readers. My narrative of the history of the case here properly terminates, it being only necessary for me to state that I was immediately incarcerated, and spent the month within the walls of a prison, one week of which was passed in sickness. I received every allowable attention from the jailor and his amiable wife, and even remained with them a day or two after my sentence expired. ”

“ We mark the startling difference between theory and fact; we try to bring that difference to the notice of those whom we can reach. All thinking men and women acknowledge, as it appears to us, that punishment can be justified only by the necessity of protecting society and diminishing as far as possible the tendency toward barbarism.
“We submit that every judge who passes what is called an ‘exemplary’ sentence in the hope of checking crime; every warden or jailer who excuses brutality toward prisoners with the plea that they have been sent to jail for punishment ”

“ All prisons should be in the hands of experts, physicians, criminologists, biologists, and, above all, the humane. Every prisoner should be made to feel that the state is interested in his good as well as the good of the society from which he came. Sentences should be indeterminate, but the indeterminate sentence of today is often a menace to freedom and a means of great cruelty and wrong. The indeterminate sentence can only be of value in a well-equipped prison where each man is under competent observation as if he were ill in a hospital. ”

“ I think we've made great progress in the Pardons and Paroles Board since I've been in office and since we've reorganized the government. We have five very enlightened people there now. And on occasion they go out to the prison system to interview the inmates, to decide whether or not they are worthy to be released after they serve one-third of their sentence. I think most jurors and most judges feel that, when they give the sentence, they know that after a third of the sentence has gone by, they will be eligible for careful consideration. ”

“ Rules made under section forty-seven of this Act may authorise the infliction of corporal punishment for mutiny, incitement to mutiny, or gross personal violence to an officer of a prison when committed by a male person serving a sentence of imprisonment, corrective training or preventive detention. ”

“ Let the criminal be throttled or beheaded in prison. His civil death has been pronounced publicly by the sentence of expulsion, and that sentence has killed him in the memory of all citizens. The citizens do not care what is done with the physical man after that sentence. ”

“ It is only in the case of hardened offenders or of those guilty of certain major offenses that a minimum sentence is imposed.
For more than a generation prison reformers have urged the extension of the pure indeterminate sentence to this class of offenders also. Their logic is sound; it is the facts that are against them. ”

“ In the main we treat all criminals alike if guilty of the same offence, though the same act denotes very different degrees of culpability in the different men, and the same punishment is attended with quite opposite results. Two men commit similar crimes, we sentence them both to the State Prison for ten years. At the expiration of one year let us suppose one man has thoroughly reformed, and has made strict and solemn resolutions to pursue an honest and useful life. ”

“ The object of the System for males is to apply, us far as practicable, having regard to the length of sentence, the methods followed at Borstal Institutions, for the special treatment of offenders 16-21 sentenced to imprisonment. The shortness of sentence, of course, operates against any manifest result, but experience has shown that with lads of this age much can be effected by close personal interest and oversight on the part not only of the prison authority, but of voluntary workers. ”

“ In some cases criminals are brought directly from the judgment-seat to the execution ground on receiving sentence, but as a rule the condemned persons remain in prison ignorant of the date of their doom, till an official, carrying a square board with the names of those who are to die that day pasted upon it, enters and reads the names of the doomed. ”

“ Deprivation of freedom in the form of confinement in prison for the entire period of the sentence, or part of such period, may be assigned by the court to persons who have committed serious crimes, or to especially dangerous recidivists. ”

“ The policy of the indeterminate sentence is that the delinquent shall be supervised and guided and his capacity to lead an honest and useful life tested by actual experience under normal conditions of living for a period of years long enough to try 42 out his capacity to readjust himself to a life of freedom in society. For this reason an adequate interval between the expiration of his minimum sentence, when he becomes eligible to parole, and the expiration of his maximum sentence, when he becomes free from judicial control, should be guaranteed by law. ”

“ There have been cases where men who had escaped from prison have lived for years exemplary lives and reached civic honors, yet, when recognized and apprehended, they had to go back to prison and serve out the unexpired sentence of the man condemned years before. ”

“ The Woman’s Prison reports 213 women paroled, of whom 105 have been discharged, the sentence of 23 expired during the parole period, 35 violated their parole and were returned to prison, 26 parole violators are at large, 7 died and 17 are reporting. ”

“ I have long held that no judge should be authorized to sentence a man to prison until the judge knew by experience what prison life really was. And now we are having authentic reports from those in authority who have taken a voluntary experience of convict life.
[2] In 1913 an Intra-Mural School was started in the Maryland penitentiary, and the story of its effect on the minds and the conduct of the thirty per cent of illiterate individuals in that prison is most interesting. It unquestionably confirms my statement that the rank and file of our convicts are inarticulate. ”

“ Here that humanity, which the law seems to forget from the moment the judge has uttered the word guilty—by letting a long delay elapse between the pronouncement of the sentence and the execution—reappears as soon as the prison opens its doors and delivers the prisoner to the sheriffs, who are charged with carrying out the sentence. The sheriffs are not military men ”

“ Our house is separated from the guardhouse by a little park only, and I could plainly see the whole thing—the strong man and the weakling.
In the meantime, bugles had called the men back to quarters, and very soon I learned all about the wretched affair. The misguided young man had deserted once before, was found guilty by a general court-martial, and sentenced to the penitentiary at Leavenworth for the regulation time for such an offense, and to-morrow morning he was to have started for the prison. Now he has to stand a second court-martial, and serve a double sentence for desertion! ”

“ Capital punishment is provided for those found guilty of murder, but, though sentenced formally to death, the prisoner is actually consigned to live out his span of years in solitary confinement in the great prison at Louvain. ”

“ One hundred and thirty convicts with terms ranging from 2 to 15 years, too busy with their day’s labor or their evening’s sports to think of evil, are building the new penitentiary or tilling the soil. Only nine hours a day, that time allotted for sleep, are the prisoners under lock and key. They go about their various duties under the direction of a guard or overseer, but the shotgun or rifle, usually accompanying such officer, is conspicuous by its absence.
The prison gives promise of being the ideal penal institution of the world.
The site is ideal for the work to be accomplished. ”

“ Justice GRAY, 'that at the present day imprisonment in a state prison or penitentiary, with or without hard labor, is an infamous punishment.' That case is decisive of this, and the order appealed from must be affirmed. ”

“ In any case the days are long when spent in a separate cell, awaiting judgment, the nights dark and often sleepless 169 and interminable. We have authentic assurance that the end of it all, the very worst,—conviction, sentence, the heaviest, the extreme penalty of the law,—comes as a distinct relief, and although a certain, shameful death is now before him, the condemned prisoner sleeps soundly on his final return from court. The prisoner condemned to death is generally worn out with the struggle for life. ”

“ Prisoners who misconduct themselves, are liable to be punished in a variety of ways;—by the infliction of corporal chastisement, by being sentenced to an irongang, to a penal settlement, or by an addition to their original sentence. A single magistrate cannot order a prisoner to receive more than fifty lashes ”

“ Many of our states, however, are adopting the indeterminate sentence with provisions that the prisoner may be released on parole. There is a great difference in the attitude of the public towards the individual released and known by society as a discharged convict and the individual released on parole. ”

“ If the subsequent crime is such that, upon a first conviction, the offender might be punished, in the discretion of the court, by imprisonment for life, he must be sentenced to imprisonment in a state prison for life. ”

“ Up and down he padded; had he committed some ugly crime, for which he longed to atone—but prison is not atonement! Had his conviction been unjust, and was he raging impotently against injustice? Let him not rage too loudly, for there was a guard yonder, indifferent to tortured souls, but licensed to stop noises. A prison is a prison, not a sanitarium for diseased crooks. But if the world could hear those footfalls, and interpret their significance, how long would prisons last? A jail at night is a strange place—eight hundred men packed in together, each terrifyingly alone! ”

“ It not unfrequently happens that, for trivial omissions upon some useless observance of forms, the victim is incarcerated in a prison, and, after enduring all the horrors of these dens of thieves, expires in want, disease, and apparent infamy! ”

“ That statute provides that every male person over twenty years of age, and every female person over eighteen years of age, convicted of a felony, or other crime punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary, except treason, murder, rape, and kidnapping, shall be sentenced to the penitentiary, the court imposing the sentence to fix its limit or duration, the term of such imprisonment not to be less than one year, nor exceeding the maximum term provided by law for the crime of which the prisoner was convicted, making allowance for good time, as provided by law. ”