New York City is indeed fortunate in having at the head of its Department of Correction a woman who has proved herself to be a modern penologist, of the most humanitarian order, and has shown such splendid knowledge of how best to make her sympathy and understanding help the inmates of our prisons; how to individualize the cases and make the punishment fit the criminal rather than the crime; to substitute hope and courage for despair, and to help the unfortunate to amount to something worth while after all. Surely it is a step forward in civilization, when a woman is chosen to an important position like this commissionership, not because she is a woman, but because it is felt that she is the right person for the place. CHILD PLAY AND CHILD CRIME [The following important article, from the New York Times of February 15, brings some of the results of a year’s Study of New York juvenile crime, as related to the recreation problem.] The relation of play to juvenile crime is coming to be more and more recognized by the student of juvenile delinquency and the discerning social worker. But the problem has not been studied intensively. The facts which show how the most celebrated gangster in New York City can get his start playing kick-the-can or baseball in the city streets have only but been regarded in a general way. For the past year Edward Barrows, special investigator for the People’s Institute, has been making a study of the evolution of the crime of children from a purely legal fact to a moral evil, and his report on the year’s work represents not only general conclusions but an intensive study of 193 individual cases of juvenile arrest. Mr. Barrows has lived for about three years in the middle west side of Manhattan, which is popularly called the Hell’s Kitchen district. He was not known as a social worker or an investigator, but as a free lance newspaper man and a good fellow generally. He has studied juvenile delinquency in the courts, in the streets and the homes, and has been an actual member of numerous boys’ gangs. The hundreds of adults and children with whom Mr. Barrows became intimate are still without an inkling as to his identity. In summing up his report, Mr. Barrows says: I became aware several years ago that the child life of the New York tenement neighborhoods is a world apart. The middle west side was chosen for investigation, both because it stands high among New York districts for its juvenile crime record, and because it is a relatively old neighborhood, representing the condition toward which the newer congested neighborhoods are developing.