if it is sufficiently scrappy and contains figures arranged in a tabular form. If heredity accounts for a man's insanity, what will account for his sanity? To say that as wolves breed wolves, criminals breed criminals, is mischievous nonsense. As canaries breed canaries, do poets breed poets? Any study of the criminal based on observations made when he is in prison is like writing a history from a study of caged birds; parts will be right, but the whole will be wrong. Any theory of the causation of evil will be fashionionable if it offers a superficial explanation of the facts, and affords an excuse for doing nothing more troublesome than giving good advice to the poorer classes. A person may be physically fit to have children and be mentally incapable of taking care of them. If there are more drunk in a given space, there was also more sober people; but only the drunks are observed. If the police were not better than the law our prisons would be always full.

In advocating the "better way," Dr. Devon maintains that a prison ought merely to be a place of detention in which offenders are placed till some proper provision is made for their supervison and means of livlihood in the community. Alike in the case of the young offender and the old, the only safety for the citizens and the only chance for the reformation of the culprit lie in his being boarded out under proper care and guardianship in the community. Unconditional liberation has ended in disaster to all concerned. Conditional liberation can only be expected to produce good results if the conditions are reasonable. All systems so far have failed to deal satisfactorily with the offender.

Dr. Devon's book should be read in conjunction with Dr. Quinton's book on "Criminals and Crime," an English study by one who has been both prison physician and prison governor. Between the the two, the American reader will gain a good insight into Brith ways of doing and thinking.

The Boy and His Gang, by J. Adams. Puffer. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1912. 188 pages. Price, $1.00 net, postpaid.

This is not a "Little Rollo" book. Good citizens, according to Mr. Puffer, are sometimes quite as much the product of good gangs as of good schools or good homes. Mr. Puffer is an ardent admirer of the robust boy. The gang stage is a necessary and desirable development of boy life. The virtues of the gang are tangible and potent: Loyalty, fidelity. co-operation, self-sacrifice, justice. The gang stage is a temporary stage from ten to about sixteen. While fighting and stealing, truancy and plaguing are undesirable qualities in themselves, they are not generally dangerous qualities in the gangster, unless he fails normally to outgrow them. The instinctive vices of the gang tend largely to be self-limiting. Three boys in every four are members of a gang. The impulse to steal is closely connected with the instinct for property, and is so entirely normal at the gang age that the boy, otherwise of good character, is seldom at all depraved. There appears to be no road to self-respect and social independence except for the youth to fight for his rights. The boy who refuses to fight, and runs away when he is being imposed upon, feels himself a coward. We must look upon the boy's gang as the result of a group of instincts inherited from a distant past. After all, cruelty, however hard on the victim, so long as it is unconscious, does little moral damage to the perpetrator. Boys enjoy fighting, and they ought to. In short, Mr. Puffer believes in the strenuous gang life, but with a fundamental basis of manliness. He sees that boys must go through the stage; let them get the maximum of good servicable life qualities out of it, with the minimum of permanently bad habits. The book is illuminating, and well worth reading. It explains many things.

The Tramp Problem.--In the March number of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science appears an article upon the Tramp Problem by O. F. Lewis, General Secretary of the Prison Association of New York. Mr. Lewis, after emphasizing the extent and the costliness of the vagrancy problem in this country, urges the establishment of a national vagrancy

committee, that shall take up among other phases of the problem the following matters: The reduction of railway trespass; the enforcement of existing vagrancy laws; the establishment of farm colonies for tramps and vagrants; the withdrawal from almshouses of the privileges of shelter for able-bodied vagrants and the substitution of special work-test shelters; the designation of certain state officials to arrest and prosecute vagrants; the abolition so far as possible of the short sentence and the idle jail; the development of free employment agencies; the cleaning up of low lodging houses; the reduction of street begging. This article appears in a volume on "Country Life," in which Professor C. R. Henderson has also an article upon "Rural Police."

Indeterminate Sentence and Release on Parole. A special committee of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology has prepared suggestions for a workable and adequate law for the administration of the indeterminate sentence and parole. The committee's report (in the March, 1912, issue of the

Journal of Crimnal Law and Criminology) provides for an indeterminate sentence, the prisoner to be subject to release or final discharge by the board of parole. The board should be composed of the member of the state board of control longest in continuous service, the warden of the state prison, and a citizen of the state appointed by the governor. The board of parole may parole a lifetermer after 35 years. Convicts on parole are to be in the custody of the board of parole. The board shall not be require to hear arguments from any person in favor of or against the parole or release of any prisoners. Each prisoner shall be credited for good prison demeanor, diligence in labor and study and results accomplished. The term of parole is not set by law.

While criticism appears at times against the indeterminate sentence and parole, the committee believes it is generally due to misunderstandings or administrative errors or failures. The system can apply equally to all classes of convicts. The committee's report closes with a valuable statement of the laws in the various states.

The Motion Picture in Prison Reform. -The motion picture has given life to the dead forms with which we have long attempted to portray those human conditions that surround the prisoner and his family as well as the institution in which he is confined and make them of interest to the general public.

At the School of Philanthropy in New York City there was exhibited by the Edison Company recently a series of motion pictures dealing with the problems of child labor, tuberculosis, the school centre, the kindergarten, etc. One of the most telling of these pictures was the one which has been prepared under the auspices of the National Committee on Prison Labor, and has been exhibited for several weeks in many of the moving picture houses throughout the country. It portrays the story of a deserted mother with a child who is deprived of

the opportunity to earn her living by competition of goods manufactured in the prison factory by the deserter-father. The committee of the union cannot protect her from the almshouse but appeals to the governor who investigates and stops the unfair competition by putting the convict father to work making shoes for his wife and child in the almshouse. A cheerful ending is found when having learned his lesson and become a good workman, the father is released and reunites his family.

The vivid portrayal of the story is not marred by the fact that it is all staged in the studio of the moving picture people. There has been no attempt to exploit individual convicts in any institution by bringing them before the public gaze. This has been done in a number of other cases where wardens have permitted the introduction of a camera within the pris

on walls and have marched the convicts past it later to be stared at by the frequenters of the five-cent playhouse. The appeal of this picture has been definitely shaped toward the reforms which the National Committee on Prison Labor hopes to accomplish and it is of such a nature as to stimulate keen interest (in all who see it) in opposing idleness of the convict on one hand and the exploitation of the convict on the other.

A Convict Levee Camp on the Atchafalaya Bayou in Louisiana.-In the Magazine Section of the New York Tribune

stay here working till the water gets too deep to work, then we move out on the steamer and wait for the water to back down!"

Within the levee is a long whitwashed dormitory. The windows are small, iron barred and mosquito barred. A shed, roofed, but open on all sides, serves as dining room. Among the rafters are boxes, one for each prisoner, and all padlocked, the prisoners carrying their keys on strings around their necks. There is a storehouse containing supplies, the captain's little house and cabins for the guards. Beyond the storehouse is the

of April 7th, appeared a interesting article, of which the following is an ex

tract:

The lowest down of the Louisiana Atchafalaya convict camps, is the convict levee camp. The levee camp consists of a mere square opening in the woods. Within ten yards of the solid bank of trees is a bank of earth, four or five feet high, extending around the opening in a perfect square.

"This," Captain Barrow of the camp said, "this is our own private levee. We

kennel, containing dark-colored, longeared, flabby-lipped boodhounds.

Six days of the week the convicts help fight the Mississippi Valley campaign against the flood. Soon after daybreak their chains are knocked off and they come from the dormitory to breakfast. They are allowed one pound of salt meat, three-fourths pound of flour, corn bread. onions, tomatoes, beans, light bread, beef

twice a week and coffee.

The routine of the work day is simple. As soon as it is daylight all hands are

ordered up and out. Breakfast is eaten, and then the men fall in line six or eight abreast. An officer and two guards lead the way, five guards march on each side and an officer and two guards bring up the rear. The 145 or 150 men are marched to the levee, and divided into squads, some to clear the way and some to wheel dirt. The clearers root up and clear a way through the forest. The others each take a shovel and wheelbarrow. The barrows are filled and wheeled up plank runs, seven barrows to a run. Each man fills his own vehicle and each must take his turn up the run.

me of seeing him kick children out of his way as he passed along a walk.

One day Sanches ordered a sickly little convict to pick up a chunk of iron. The prisoner tried to do it, but the mass was beyond his strength.

"Pick it up!" the contractor shouted, pounding the man with a heavy cane he carried.

On all sides of the two were convicts digging and working. Two or three yards behind him was a yellow man, breaking the ground with a pick. The victim's screams of pain were heard on all sides, but only one man looked up. The yellow

that the state cease its practice of letting out its criminals. The state convict camps were the result of the agitation.

One Cause of Juvenile Crime in New York City, Half-Time in School.Thomas D. Walsh, superintendent of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, says:

"Of the vast army of boys and girls in Manhattan and the Bronx only 9,477, or less than nine-tenths of one per cent. of the juvenile population, were taken before the Children's Court in Manhattan

during the last year. Five times that number of children, namely 47,307, were brought to the society's attention under other conditions.

The chief causes of juvenile delinquency are such as to offer no immediate means of correction. Many children are taken into custody for offences committed during school hours. When these are not truants they are half time pupils. This is a most unfortunate condition in our school administration. No child should be kept on half time, the school term being short enough as it is."

Exiling Criminals.-Under this heading the New Bedford (Mass.) Standard speaks plainly and pointedly, thus:

"The action of the Massachusetts executive council the other day, in pardoning a criminal on condition of his exiling himself, was by no means unprecedented. It was, however, a conspicuous example of a practice the propriety of which is not free from challenge on moral grounds, while its practical expediency is by no means assured.

"It is simply telling the criminal to move on and inflict himself upon some other place. We must seriously question.. the morals of the practice. The courts have held that one community has no right to discharge its sewage upon the land or into the streams of another. What better right has one to discharge its criminals or wastrels ?"

Prisoner Stole Poem Which Secured His Pardon.-The Columbus Ohio Dispatch is the authority for this unique. story:

Jake McKinney, a prisoner at Ft. Worth, Texas, who was freed by Gov

ernor Colquitt because of the authorship of a poem, "Another Chance," was not the author of the poem at all. It was written, according to the Ohio Penitentiary News, by Leo. Mitchell, a prisoner in the Ohio institution, a year before McKinney used it. McKinney copied it and sent it to the governor as his own. The Governor read it and wept and then granted a Thanksgiving pardon to the supposed author.

First Term Men Go to Comstock Prison, New York.-That it is the intention of the State prison authorities to make the Grand Meadow prison at Comstock a permanent reform institution, is the statement made an inspector of the State Prison Commission. First termers will follow various pursuits, such as farming, crushing stone, excavating, and caring for a large dairy.

Mr. Osborne, Head Keeper New Jer sey State Prison, Retires.-George O. Osborne, retiring head keeper of the New Jersey State Prison, was given a farewell by the 1.475 convicts in the institution on March 18th. His term expired March 17th. He will make his home in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he has purchased an orange grove.

Cell, Phoenix, Ariz.-Governor Hunt ocArizona's Governor Spends Night in cupied cell No. 24 for one night at the

State Penitentiary at Florence with Frank Howard, who is serving a three years' sentence for burglary. After his experience he expressed the opinion that all governors should pass a night in a cell to learn what it feels like to be incarcerated.

Folsom State Prison Under Investigation, San Francisco, Cal.—Governor Johnson's new Prison Commission is investigating the Folsom State Prison. The warden and his aides are charged with cruelty, inefficiency and failure to enforce discipline.

Memphis Mayor Tries Mission Bath, Bed and Soup.-Edward Hall Crump. Mayor of Memphis, Tenn., visited the Memphis Rescue Mission to get first hand