Parole Decisions

Abstract

In 1870, at the organizational meeting of what is now the American Correctional Association, Sir Walter Crofton, who had been in charge of the Irish prison system, was a featured speaker. Crofton believed that the intent of the law was to make prisons “more than places of safekeeping” and that there should be programs of reform in prison with “tickets of leave” given only to those who evidenced a change in attitude (Newman, 1963:29). Tickets of leave had been used in England, along with quasi-indeterminate sentences (within a fixed range) since 1853; and they had been used first in 1840 in the program of transporting prisoners from England to America in accordance with an English law of 1597 (Newman, 1963). The ticket of leave, as originated by Alexander Macanochie (who was in charge of the English penal colony at Norfolk Island in 1840), was part of a plan for passing convicts through several steps: first, strict imprisonment; second, chain gangs; then, freedom within a limited area; and finally, a ticket of leave resulting in a conditional pardon pending the full restoration of liberty (Rubin, Weihofen, Edwards, and Rosenzweig, 1963). The concept, therefore, rested upon a system of progressive classification and assignment to increasingly lesser levels of supervision and custodial control, as discussed in Chapter 7, with increasing freedom while still under sentence.