This year’s conference (Boston, June 7-14) bids fair to be the best yet. The topics in general are timely and fundamental. The Committee on Lawbreakers will have for its general session the opening evening, Wednesday, the seventh. In addition to the committee report, a speaker of national reputation will give an address. In the section meetings the topics will be, respectively, the care of defective delinquents, modern methods of dealing with misdemeanants, and the development of systems of probation and parole. The section meetings will be “round table” discussions, open to all.
THE TREND OF LEGISLATION
Most legislative sessions for 1911 are now through or nearly so. Certain general tendencies have been prominent in prison and correctional legislation. The problems of prison labor have been prominent in California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, New York and some other states. The trend of legislation is strongly toward the introduction or strengthening of the state-use system. Legislative inquiries into alleged mal-administration have been instituted in several states. The question of corporal punishment has been under investigation in Michigan. The Review will give the results of these investigations, but believes it inadvisable to print statements and comments prior to official findings.
Legislatures have been asked in many
states, notably Wisconsin, Indiana, California, New York, to consider the establishment of new kinds of correctional institutions for tramps and vagrants, or for inebriates, or for young misdemeanants. The health of prisoners attracts increasing attention, as well as their mental conditions.
FOUR MONTHS OF THE REVIEW
The Review is growing gently. We hope surely, also. Its purpose to be a live news-sheet in the prison field is being gradually worked out. What the Review wants is comment from its subscribers as to how it can be made most useful.
The editor holds that the “prison field” includes efforts in behalf of the prisoner before imprisonment, after imprisonment, on probation and on parole. Very germane to the work and interest of prisoners and societies are movements for the care of those mentally and socially sick and tending toward delinquency and crime, such as the tramp and the vagrant, the inebriate, the feeble-minded offender, the youthful transgressor. So the Review will give a share of its attention to such actual or proposed organizations or institutions as children’s courts and villages, farm colonies, hospitals and colonies for inebriates, psychopathic institutions for the study of the defective delinquent, as well as to all the movements and progress of general interest in the narrower prison field.
During these four months W. D. Lane, a member of the New York School of Philanthropy, has been serving the Review as Assistant Editor. His help has been of very material value.