Description

Written by and named after Senator Caleb H. Baumes

Caleb H. Baumes

Caleb Howard Baumes was an American lawyer and politician from New York-Life:He married in 1883 and had two sons....

, the chairman of the New York State Crime Commission, the law called for the automatic life imprisonment

Life imprisonment

Life imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment for a serious crime under which the convicted person is to remain in jail for the rest of his or her life...

 of any criminal convicted of more than three separate felonies

Felony

A felony is a serious crime in the common law countries. The term originates from English common law where felonies were originally crimes which involved the confiscation of a convicted person's land and goods; other crimes were called misdemeanors...

, without regard to the nature of the offense or any attendant circumstance

Attendant circumstance

Attendant circumstance is a legal concept which Black's Law Dictionary defines as the "facts surrounding an event."...

s. It also permitted longer sentences for first-time offenders, denied parole to inmates who had used firearms in the commission of their crimes, and mandated that prisoners could not begin receiving credit for good behavior for parole purposes until they had served the minimum sentence for their offense. By 1930, twenty-three states had adopted similar standards, all of which were commonly referred to as "Baumes laws".

The law was made possible by the growing adoption and acceptance of fingerprinting as a method of identification by police departments, which began to replace anthropometry

Anthropometry

Anthropometry refers to the measurement of the human individual...

 as the technique of choice in the 1920s. Law enforcement officials felt that the new methods enabled them to more efficiently and reliably distinguish recalcitrant criminals from reformed ones. By 1931, two hundred four-time offenders in New York had been given life sentences under the Baumes law.

Legal challenges

A serious challenge to the Baumes law concerned the case of a shoplifter

Shoplifting

Shoplifting is theft of goods from a retail establishment. It is one of the most common property crimes dealt with by police and courts....

 named Ruth St. Clair, who was arrested for the fourth time after stealing items from a department store

Department store

A department store is a retail establishment which satisfies a wide range of the consumer's personal and residential durable goods product needs; and at the same time offering the consumer a choice of multiple merchandise lines, at variable price points, in all product categories...

 in December 1929. St. Clair had three prior convictions of a similar nature in 1920, 1924, and 1926, for stealing items such as coats and dresses from stores. When she was convicted of the 1929 offense, the Baumes law imposed a life sentence, the first given to a woman since its enactment. St. Clair's case attracted much media attention, but the United States Supreme Court upheld her sentence in 1930. St. Clair eventually spent eight years in prison, before her sentence was commuted to time served.

Effects of the Baumes law

While the Baumes law seemed to remove authority from judges and parole boards by mandating sentences, they gradually began to work around it through the increased use of plea bargain

Plea bargain

A plea bargain is an agreement in a criminal case whereby the prosecutor offers the defendant the opportunity to plead guilty, usually to a lesser charge or to the original criminal charge with a recommendation of a lighter than the maximum sentence.A plea bargain allows criminal defendants to...

s. In cases where a life sentence would have been unjust, prosecutors became more amenable to accused parties' guilty pleas to misdemeanor

Misdemeanor

A misdemeanor is a "lesser" criminal act in many common law legal systems. Misdemeanors are generally punished much less severely than felonies, but theoretically more so than administrative infractions and regulatory offences...

 charges, which would not trigger portions of the statute.

The Baumes law increased prison populations as persons who would formerly have been paroled remained incarcerated, placing a strain on infrastructure

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...

. In addition to a negative effect on prison conditions, the Baumes law also decreased prisoner morale, since it greatly decreased inmates' ability to achieve parole. Commenting on the Baumes law in his autobiography, Clarence Darrow

Clarence Darrow

Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...

 wrote,

"The unfortunates in prisons felt that there was no chance for regaining liberty once the prison doors closed upon them. This hopelessness kindled prison revolts, which led to fearful slaughter, to the destruction of all that the years of earnest work had done to modify conditions by building up humane prisons, caring for juvenile offenders, and giving the condemned hope or opportunity once more to be free."

The Baumes law led to 1929 riots at Auburn

Auburn Prison

Auburn Correctional Facility is a state prison located on State Street in Auburn, New York, built on land that was once a Cayuga Indian Village. It is classified as a maximum security facility....

 and Dannemora, with nine prisoners and a guard losing their lives during the former.

Lewisohn Commission

In response to the riots, New York appointed a committee to investigate the state's prison system. Led by Sam Lewisohn, who would ultimately become the president of the American Prison Association

American Correctional Association

The American Correctional Association , formerly known as the American Prison Association, is the oldest and largest international correctional association in the world. Approximately 80 percent of all state departments of corrections and youth services are active participants...

, the Lewisohn Commission issued a number of recommended changes, the majority of which became policy. Among these was a shift from the mandatory sentences of the Baumes law to a more open-ended sentencing and parole system, focused on rehabilitation and vocational training.

"Bum's rush"

Some people mistakenly believe that a corrupted version of "Baumes law" was the origin for the idiom "bum's rush". However, this phrase was in common use before the passage of the Baumes law, and it is derived from the practice of evicting tramps or vagrants from bars and other public places.