Word: penal
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...carrot-whip option of the site of confinement ranks second only to the leverage provided by the indeterminate sentence as a customarily effective weapon at the disposal of the California penal officials. They can punish the prisoner with whom they are dissatisfied or by whom they are threatened by sending him to San Quentin or Folsom, the maximum security joint. On the other hand, it is also in their power to reward a con by transferring him to Chino or one of the other minimum security prisons-without-walls located in the southern part of the state. Moreover, the authorities...
...indeterminate sentence is an old idea first advocated by British and French penal reformers in the 19th century. The European reformers and their American counterparts argued that the practice of giving a convict a fixed sentence--one in which the time to be served is immutable by any action by the convict--provided to incentive for the inmate to reform. With nothing to gain by reforming, the prisoner usually became bitter and dangerously hostile to prison officials and the society they represented. The con served hard time, and often after his release sought revenge on society for his incarceration...
Essentially then, the indeterminate sentence uses two means to attempt the reform of the convict. First, it removes the power or responsibility of sentencing from the courts and invests it in the penal system. Second, it attempts to use the flexibility derived from that shift as a means of inducing the convict to make "some indication of amended character...
...Michigan became the first state to use the indeterminate sentencing concept on adult offenders by passing a law changing the procedure of the penal disposition of convicted prostitutes. Under the new law, hookers were sentenced to a maximum of three years in the Detroit House of Correction but could be released earlier at the discretion of the institution's board of managers...
...Jackson relates, the Youth Authority's reforms did nothing to alter the basic emotional shock of entering into a penal institution for the first time...