Describe the judicial reprieve and the beginnings of the first real probation system.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A judicial reprieve was a British and American practice of delaying sentencing following a conviction, a delay that most often would become permanent if the offender demonstrated good behavior. In those days, there were no probation officers charged with supervising reprieved individuals; the nosey and judgmental nature of the small communities typical of those days was more than adequate for that task. Early American courts also used judicial reprieve whereby a judge would suspend the sentence and the defendant would be released on his or her own recognizance. In early America, it was granted to persons already convicted as a form of probation, although offenders received no formal supervision or assistance to help them to mend their ways. The first real probation system in which a reprieved person was supervised and helped was developed in the United States in the 1840s by a Boston cobbler named John Augustus. Augustus would appear in court and offer to take carefully selected offenders into his own home where he would do what he could to reform them as an alternative to imprisonment. Probation soon became his full-time vocation, and he recruited other civic-minded volunteers to help him. By the time of his death in 1859, he and his volunteers had saved more than 2,000 convicts from imprisonment). In 1878, the Massachusetts legislature authorized Boston to hire salaried probation officers to do the work of Augustus’s volunteers, and a number of states quickly followed suit. However, the probation idea almost died in 1916 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judges may not indefinitely suspend a sentence. Probation was such a popular idea with legislators at this time, however, that this ruling led to the passage of the National Probation Act of 1925 allowing judges to suspend sentences and place convicted individuals on probation if they found that circumstances warranted it.