History
Reacting to the squalor in the penitentiaries, another wave of reform swept the country in the 1860. Reformation replaced penitence as the key word in American penology. Prisoners were to be held only until the institution had done its job, until the prisoner had been reformed. The concepts of parole and indeterminate sentencing were regarded as forward looking in the 1870s. However, crime was not eradicated. Reformatories had the same problems of political appointment and underfunding. A problem turned out to be indeterminate sentencing. Prisoners quickly found that if they could learn to beat the system they stood a better chance of winning parole. Beating the system was not difficult: say the kind of words wardens and parole boards wanted to hear, act like the kind of person they wanted to see, hide anger and resentment behind a facade of genuine reform—this, inmates discovered, was the surest path to early freedom. No wonder so many of them were soon back in custody. Another problem with indeterminate sentencing was that prison authorities also learned to twist it to their advantage, The authorities did not hesitate to deny parole, even to those who deserved it, if they thought doing so would serve their own purposes.
But the biggest cause of the reformatories' failure to live up to expectations was a matter of attitude. Despite the enthusiasm reformers felt for indeterminate sentencing and for prison education and job-training programs, despite Brockway's stirring call for an end to vengeance in criminal justice, the people inside each prison—inmates and guards alike—never stopped seeing prison as a place of retribution.
In 1954, Master Sergeant Maurice L. Schick was convicted by a military court-martial in the brutal murder of an eight-year old girl, and sentenced to death, the ultimate penalty. Six years later, the case was forwarded to Pres. Eisenhower for final review, and he commuted his sentence to confinement at hard labor for the term of his natural life, on the express condition that he "shall never have any rights, privileges, claims or benefits arising under the parole and suspension or remission of sentence laws of the United States . . ."
Read more about this topic: Life Imprisonment In The United States
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