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The situation was even more critical at the state and local level where penitentiaries and jails were already filled to capacity. In the late 1920s news stories of spectacular crime and gang violence increased interest in longer sentences for convicted offenders and habitualcriminal statutes. Harsher sentences soon caused these institutions to be overwhelmed. Their function as rehabilitation centers, the product of twenty years of reform sentiment and theory, was reduced to containment only. Little was done until conditions in the prisons became so severe'as to cause extensive rioting in 1929, the beginning of a nationwide wave of prison riots that lasted through 1932. In New York in 1930 conditions in the state's penitentiaries deteriorated so dramatically that then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was forced to ask the state assembly for emergency appropriations with which to finance a program of significant prison construction, temporary work camps for nonviolent felons, an...
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This section contains 247 words (approx. 1 page at 300 words per page) |
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