T HE MI S M E A SURE OF MANtheir work contains the seeds of doubt that have led many modern
reformers to question the humane nature of Lombroso's indeter-
minate sentences and to advocate a return to the fixed penalties of
classical criminology. Maurice Parmelee, America's leading positiv-
ist, decried as too harsh a New York State law of 1915 that pre-
scribed an indeterminate sentence of up to three years for such
infractions as disorderly conduct, disorderly housekeeping, intox-
ication, and vagrancy (Parmelee, 1918). Lombroso's daughter
praised the complete dossier of moods and deeds kept by volunteer
women who guided the fortunes of juvenile offenders in several
states. They will "permit judges, if the child commits an offense, to
distinguish between a born criminal and a habitual criminal. How-
ever, the child will not know of the existence of this dossier,
and this will permit him the most complete freedom to develop"
Lombroso-Ferrero, 1911, p. 124). She also admitted the bur-
densome element of harassment and humiliation included in sev-
eral systems of probation, particularly in Massachusetts, where
indefinite parole might continue for life: "In the Central Probation
Bureau of Boston, I have read many letters from proteges who
asked to be returned to their prisons, rather than continue the
humiliation of their protector always on their backs (or "in their
bundles," as she said literally in French—Lombroso-Ferrero, 1911 ,
P- 135)-
For the Lombrosians, indeterminate sentencing embodied both
good biology and maximal protection for the state: "Punishment
ought not to be the visitation of a crime by a retribution, but rather
a defense of society adapted to the danger personified by the crim-
inal" (Ferri, 1897, P- 208). Dangerous people receive longer sen-
tences, and their subsequent lives are monitored more strictly. And
so the system of indeterminate penalties—Lombroso's legacy—
exerts a general and powerful element of control over every aspect
of a prisoner's life: his dossier expands and controls his fate; he is
watched in prison and his acts are judged with the carrot of early
release before him. It is also used in Lombroso's original sense to
sequester the dangerous. For Lombroso, this meant the born crim-
inal with his apish stigmata. Today, it often means the defiant, the
poor, and the black. George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother,
died under Lombroso's legacy, trying to escape after eleven years
(eight and a half in solitary) of an indeterminate one-year-to-life
sentence for stealing seventy dollars from a gas station.