The Indeterminate Sentence. What Shall be done with the Criminal Class?
n.p. n.p., [1899]. 14 pp. 8vo. Stapled paper wrappers. First edition. A very good+ copy with toned edges. Item #38647
American essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner, Twain's coauthor on The Gilded Age, was a lawyer by training, and wrote this article against the backdrop of criminal reform in Connecticut. In it, he gives attention to the rules and regulations of parole and parole violations, in particular defense of the Indeterminate Sentence, which Warner describes as a scientific, a disciplinary, a really humanitarian method.
"We have tried all other means of protecting society, of lessening the criminal class, of reforming the criminal. The proposed Indeterminate Sentence, with reformatory discipline, is the only one that promises to relieve society of the insolent domination and the terrorism of the criminal class; is the only one that can deter men from making a career of crime; is the only one that offers a fair prospect for the reformation of the criminal offender. Why not try it? Why not put the whole system of criminal jurisprudence and procedure for the suppression of crime upon a sensible and scientific basis?"
Quite uncommon. It would be quoted in full in The Connecticut Magazine (Vol. 5) in support of a bill on prison reform, and later be republished in his "Fashions in Literature" (1902). OCLC locates three copies: Columbia Law, Trinity College, and Yale Law.
Price: $75.00