For the Defense - Vol. 8, Issue 1 - 10

State Parole Release:
A History, A Myth, and a Process
David Crowley
P
ennsylvania's penitentiary movement of the early nineteenth
century, while championed by luminaries like Tocqueville as
an improvement over the barbarity of physical disfigurement
as the principal means of punishing non-capital offenders, was
not without its detractors. The penitentiary movement focused
on correcting criminal behaviors through isolation so severe that
the penitent could have no thoughts other than to reflect on
the wrongfulness of his conduct. In 1831, Charles Dickens visited
our own Eastern Penitentiary. In American Notes for General
Circulation, he graphically indicts the inhumanity of that prison by
observing:
Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes
into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and
in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped
between him and the living world, he is led to the cell
from which he never again comes forth, until his whole
term of imprisonment has expired.... He is a man buried
alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years....
A good argument could be made that the movement merely
replaced physical with mental disfigurement.
While the " solitary " aspect of confinement eased a bit, prison
sentences remained the flat number of years announced by the
sentencing judge. In 1861, our Supreme Court struck down a
legislative attempt at permitting the release of prisoners for good
behavior.1
Release prior to completion of the imposed sentence was
relegated to executive clemency until the parole system became
popular in the United States in the 1890s.2
10 For The Defense l Vol. 8, Issue 1
Pennsylvania would wait until 1909 to adopt an indeterminate
sentencing scheme with parole release at the discretion of the
governor.3
Tim Wile, in his invaluable treatise on probation and
parole, observes that without legislative proscriptions delineating
requirements of a minimum and maximum sentence, most judges
reverted to the familiar practice of imposing flat sentences. This
problem was not cured until the Ludlow Act of 1923 which required
the sentencing court to impose a minimum sentence of not more
than one half of the imposed maximum sentence.4
In the summer of 1941, Governor Arthur James signed the
Parole Act which survived an immediate constitutional challenge
to its delegation of the parole release authority to a parole board.5
For more than 50 years, parole release was vested in the sound
discretion of a board appointed by the governor on advice and
consent of the Pennsylvania Senate, but without formal guidelines
or directives. That changed in 1995 following the decision to parole
" Mudman " Simon.
Mudman was serving a 10-to-20-year sentence for killing a
girlfriend who had refused his invitation to entertain his associates.
He had been denied parole release at his minimum and on two
subsequent occasions. He was paroled on the recommendation of
the Department of Corrections after his fourth Board interview,
but not before waiting 3 months for approval of a home plan and
a transfer of supervision out of state. Six weeks after his arrival
in New Jersey; Mudman, while on the way to commit a burglary,
killed a police officer during a routine traffic stop. A good deal
of finger-pointing, second guessing, and Senate investigations in
For the Defense - Vol. 8, Issue 1

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