Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [193]
But there is a further question. Did Miranda (and similar decisions) make much of a difference to the police, or to the people they arrested? What was the actual impact—on the streets and in station houses, jails, and interrogation rooms? There is a small but suggestive literature.30 Certainly, people are now more aware of their “rights,” including a lot of people who, in the past, would have been aware of no such things. In a sense, there was nothing much for them to know. The police did more or less as they pleased.
Is Miranda more than a routine gesture, more than just a “piece of station house furniture”? The quote is from David Simon’s book, which tracks the work of the Baltimore homicide squad in 1988. Miranda does not mean very much in Baltimore. Most defendants sign a piece of paper and waive their rights. They do this, even though it is hard to see what advantage it gives them. The detectives con and manipulate them. Perhaps it has to be that way. Miranda requires, in Simon’s words, a kind of “institutional schizophrenia.” It is like “a referee introducing a barroom brawl: The stem warnings to hit above the waist and take no cheap shots have nothing to do with the mayhem that follows.”31 The Supreme Court, obviously, has no power to micro-manage the police. How far its power does reach, and by what mechanism, remains mostly an open question.
Punishment and Corrections
In the early years of this century, the reforms of the late nineteenth century came into full flower: parole, probation, the indeterminate sentence. States that had not yet adopted them, now did so. Thus California enacted an indeterminate sentence law in 1917.
During the twenties in the Massachusetts Reformatory, the “Elmira system” came into full use. When the doors first closed on an inmate, he was classified as a prisoner of the second grade. If he earned 750 credit marks within five consecutive months, he graduated to the first grade. “Perfect conduct, industry and labor, and diligence in study” earned five credits a day. Misconduct, of course, cost credits; and a second-grade inmate who failed to earn 125 marks a month for two months in a row dropped into the hell of the third grade—a rare condition, which at one time meant the convict was forced to wear a uniform of “flaming, cardinal red.” First grade, on the other hand, meant a uniform with yellow chevrons; for a perfect record, a diamond was added to the chevrons.32
Parole came into its own in the twentieth century. By 1925, forty-six out of the forty-eight states of the union had parole laws (the exceptions being, as one might expect, two southern states: Mississippi and Virginia). 33 Even these two states fell in line by 1942.34
Parole, like the indeterminate sentence, was part of the process of making criminal justice better suited to the individual case. And this was, in theory, profoundly humanizing. In practice, the results were somewhat checkered. In Illinois, which adopted a parole system in 1897, prison sentences actually grew longer rather than shorter after the law was passed: men sentenced to the penitentiary at Joliet were serving an average of 2.1 years by the mid-1920s, as opposed to 1.5 years before parole was introduced. Moreover, parole in Illinois tended to replace pardons and commutations, which had shriveled almost to zero by 1926.35 Parole and the indeterminate sentence were deeply discretionary; but they were also powerful instruments of control. A 1925 Pennsylvania report put the matter succinctly: “Parole is not leniency. On the contrary, parole really increases the state’s period of control.” If the prisoner is “liberated by any other means,” he goes out of prison “a free