Indeterminate Sentence

Indeterminate Sentence

Project Gutenberg's The Indeterminate Sentence, by Charles Dudley
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Title: The Indeterminate Sentence What Shall Be Done With The
Criminal Class?
Author: Charles Dudley Warner
Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #3115]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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INDETERMINATE SENTENCE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE INDETERMINATE SENTENCE--WHAT SHALL BE DONE
WITH THE CRIMINAL CLASS?
By Charles Dudley Warner
The problem of dealing with the criminal class seems insolvable, and it

undoubtedly is with present methods. It has never been attempted on a
fully scientific basis, with due regard to the protection of society and to
the interests of the criminal.
It is purely an economic and educational problem, and must rest upon
the same principles that govern in any successful industry, or in
education, and that we recognize in the conduct of life. That little
progress has been made is due to public indifference to a vital question
and to the action of sentimentalists, who, in their philanthropic zeal;
fancy that a radical reform can come without radical discipline. We are
largely wasting our energies in petty contrivances instead of striking at
the root of the evil.
What do we mean by the criminal class? It is necessary to define this
with some precision, in order to discuss intelligently the means of
destroying this class. A criminal is one who violates a statute law, or, as
we say, commits a crime. The human law takes cognizance of crime
and not of sin. But all men who commit crime are not necessarily in the
criminal class. Speaking technically, we put in that class those whose
sole occupation is crime, who live by it as a profession, and who have
no other permanent industry. They prey upon society. They are by their
acts at war upon it, and are outlaws.
The State is to a certain extent responsible for this class, for it has
trained most of them, from youth up, through successive detentions in
lock-ups, city prisons, county jails, and in State prisons, and
penitentiaries on relatively short sentences, under influences which tend
to educate them as criminals and confirm them in a bad life. That is to
say, if a man once violates the law and is caught, he is put into a
machine from which it is very difficult for him to escape without
further deterioration. It is not simply that the State puts a brand on him
in the eyes of the community, but it takes away his self-respect without
giving him an opportunity to recover it. Once recognized as in the
criminal class, he has no further concern about the State than that of
evading its penalties so far as is consistent with pursuing his occupation
of crime.
To avoid misunderstanding as to the subject of this paper, it is

necessary to say that it is not dealing with the question of prison reform
in its whole extent. It attempts to consider only a pretty well defined
class. But in doing this it does not say that other aspects of our public
peril from crime are not as important as this. We cannot relax our
efforts in regard to the relations of poverty, drink, and unsanitary
conditions, as leading to crime. We have still to take care of the
exposed children, of those with parentage and surroundings inclining to
crime, of the degenerate and the unfortunate. We have to keep up the
warfare all along the line against the demoralization of society. But we
have hereto deal with a specific manifestation; we have to capture a
stronghold, the possession of which will put us in much better position
to treat in detail the general evil.
Why should we tolerate any longer a professional criminal class? It is
not large. It is contemptibly small compared with our seventy millions
of people. If I am not mistaken, a late estimate gave us less than fifty
thousand persons in our State prisons and penitentiaries. If we add to
them those at large who have served one or two terms, and are
generally known to the police, we shall not have probably more than
eighty thousand of the criminal class. But call it a hundred thousand. It
is a body that seventy millions of people ought to take care of with little
difficulty. And we certainly ought to stop its increase. But we do not.
The class grows every day. Those who watch the criminal reports are
alarmed by the fact that an increasing number