And what do we gain by our present method?  We do not gain the protection of society, and we do not gain the reformation of the criminal.  These two statements do not admit of contradiction.  Even those who cling to the antiquated notion that the business of society is to punish the offender must confess that in this game society is getting the worst of it.  Society suffers all the time, and the professional criminal goes on with his occupation, interrupted only by periods of seclusion, during which he is comfortably housed and fed.  The punishment he most fears is being compelled to relinquish his criminal career.  The object of punishment for violation of statute law is not vengeance, it is not to inflict injury for injury.  Only a few persons now hold to that.  They say now that if it does little good to the offender, it is deterrent as to others.  Now, is our present system deterrent?  The statute law, no doubt, prevents many persons from committing crime, but our method of administering it certainly does not lessen the criminal class, and it does not adequately protect society.  Is it not time we tried, radically, a scientific, a disciplinary, a really humanitarian method?

The proposed method is the indeterminate sentence.  This strikes directly at the criminal class.  It puts that class beyond the power of continuing its depredations upon society.  It is truly deterrent, because it is a notification to any one intending to enter upon that method of living that his career ends with his first felony.  As to the general effects of the indeterminate sentence, I will repeat here what I recently wrote for the Yale Law Journal: 

It is unnecessary to say in a law journal that the indeterminate sentence is a measure as yet untried.  The phrase has passed into current speech, and a considerable portion of the public is under the impression that an experiment of the indeterminate sentence is actually being made.  It is, however, still a theory, not adopted in any legislation or in practice anywhere in the world.

   The misconception in regard to this has arisen from the fact that
   under certain regulations paroles are granted before the expiration
   of the statutory sentence.

An indeterminate sentence is a commitment to prison without any limit.  It is exactly such a commitment as the court makes to an asylum of a man who is proved to be insane, and it is paralleled by the practice of sending a sick man to the hospital until he is cured.

The introduction of the indeterminate sentence into our criminal procedure would be a radical change in our criminal legislation and practice.  The original conception was that the offender against the law should be punished, and that the punishment should be made to fit the crime, an ‘opera bouffe’ conception which has been abandoned in reasoning though not in practice.  Under this conception the criminal code was arbitrarily