Especial good work has been done by the Borstal association, founded under the patronage of the best known and most distinguished persons in English public life--archbishops, judges, cabinet ministers and privy councillors--which receives the juvenile adults on their release and helps them to employment. Their labours, backed by generous voluntary contributions, have produced very gratifying results. Although the offenders originally selected to undergo the Borstal treatment were those committed for a period of six months, it was recognized that this limit was experimental, and that thoroughly satisfactory results could only be obtained with sentences of at least a year's duration, so as to give the reforming agencies ample time to operate. In the second year's working of the system it was formally applied to young convicts sentenced to penal servitude between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. In the next year it was adopted for all offenders between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one committed to prison, as far as the length of sentence would permit. The commissioners of prisons, in their _Report_ for the year 1908 (Cd. 4300) thus expressed themselves on the working of the experiment:-- "Experience soon began to point to the probable success of this general application of the principle, in spite of the fact that the prevailing shortness of sentences operated against full benefit being derived from reformatory effort. The success was most marked in those localities where magistrates, or other benevolent persons, personally co-operated in making the scheme a success. Local Borstal committees were established at all prisons, and it was arranged that those members of the local committees should become _ex officio_ honorary members of the Central Borstal Association, which it was intended should become, what it now is, the parent society directing the general aid on discharge of this category of young prisoners."