860 THE CRIMINAL GROUP 



Prisons, borrowed it from Maconochie, adding to it a system of grades. 

 Marks and grades thus passed into English criminal law, and were 

 accepted by some other nations, notably by Denmark and Hungary. 

 Recorder Hill, of Birmingham, was the connecting link through 

 which the knowledge of the Irish system was communicated to the 

 American mind. Its philosophic soundness and practical utility 

 were at once recognized, and an effort was made to apply it to 

 American conditions. Progressive or conditional liberation was the 

 heart and core of that system; but it was not carried to its logical 

 conclusion either by Maconochie or by Crofton, probably because of 

 its novelty and the natural operation of the cautionary instinct. 

 The opportunity to transplant it came, when the State of New York 

 created, at Elmira, the first intermediate or reformatory prison, 

 designed for young men supposed to have been convicted for the first 

 time of a felonious offense. Mr. Z. R. Brockway, an experienced 

 prison officer, with a daring, original, and open mind, and a passionate 

 love of his work, a man in whom the scientific temperament largely 

 predominated, who was well versed in the literature of penology, and 

 who united in his complex and versatile nature the impulse to save 

 men by uplifting them with the enthusiasm of a born educator, 1 

 was chosen to be its superintendent. This event marked an epoch, 

 the turning-point in the history of prisons, not only in America, but, 

 as I believe, in the civilized world. It was the birthday of the new 

 criminology. 



In the organization of the Elmira Reformatory, to the marks and 

 grades of the Irish system there was added the indeterminate sen- 

 tence. Strictly speaking, an indeterminate sentence would be one 

 without either a maximum or minimum limit. Offenders were 

 formerly consigned to prisons like the Tower or the Bastile, to be 

 held during the pleasure of the King. That was an arbitrary act. 

 The contrary idea, in the minds of the advocates of the indeterminate 

 sentence, was that it should be (and some of them so called it) a 

 " reformation " sentence, or a sentence to imprisonment until the 

 convict should give satisfactory evidence of his reformation. It was 

 felt to be impossible to induce the legislature to take so long a step 

 in advance, and the New York Reformatory Act fixed an invariable 

 maximum term of incarceration, usually five years (but in every 

 case the maximum term authorized by the criminal code for the 

 offense proved), leaving it to the discretion of the authorities in charge 

 of the institution to release on parole at an earlier date such prisoners 

 as they might deem it safe to set at large. At that time this was an 

 absolute novelty in legislation. Juvenile delinquents, it is true, were 

 in some states held to be wards of the state during the period of their 

 minority, to whom the government stands in loco parentis, and, after 



1 Froebel declares that education is " deliverance." 



