In 1970, all American sentencing systems were built on the ideas that most criminal offenders could be rehabilitated, and that this goal could best be accomplished through a system of individualized decisions about punishment. The approach, which dated back to the late nineteenth century, was called indeterminate sentencing because of the unpredictability of the sentences it produced. Sentencing judges had discretion to choose sanctions from a wide range of options and were expected to tailor their sentences to the particular "correctional" needs of each offender. Unsurprisingly, the penalties imposed tended to reflect the idiosyncrasies of the judge assigned to the case. No fixed rules governed courts' judgments (except that maximum statutory penalties could not be exceeded), there was no requirement that judges give reasons for their decisions, and no meaningful review of sentencing orders was available to the government or defendant. In cases of imprisonment, a parole board held further case-by-case authority to determine actual lengths of confinement. According to the theory of the day, the parole board was called upon to watch and discern when each prisoner had successfully been rehabilitated and could be returned to society. As with the initial sentence imposed by judges, parole release decisions were essentially unguided by rule or principle, went unexplained, and was not appealable.
To say that indeterminate sentencing systems were designed on a rehabilitative model is not to say that rehabilitation was pursued seriously or accomplished with frequency. Despite the good intentions of many people in the corrections field, this was seldom the case. For one thing, most plausible programs to counsel or educate criminals are expensive, and U.S. legislatures have never had great enthusiasm for major spending in the area. For another, few existing programs ever succeeded in producing demonstrable rehabilitation in offender populations. Such operational difficulties led to a fundamental irony: the large building blocks of the high-discretion sentencing system were ostensibly in service of a treatment agenda, but no one could say with confidence how to perform the miracle on the ground level.
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