The board has announced, however, that it will not renew the contract for any certain period of time, if any extension is granted. It may be advisable, it is said, to continue the present arrangement to keep the men employed from November 1 until such time next year as the legislature can provide some industry at the prison which will take the place of the tool contract. The State of Iowa has registered a protest against the convict labor system. As fast as the contracts at the penitentiary expire the state must make some new arrangement. At Fort Madison one contract expires this year. The chair contract, employing a maximum of 179 men, does not run out until 1916. This then will free this prison of contracts and the buildings now housing the machinery of private companies will be used by the state in the manufacture of some product which will most benefit the state. The Fort Madison Tool Company pays the state $50,000 for the use of 150 men, or $333.33 a year per man, based on the maximum permitted under the agreement. The board of control has stated that this sum is not sufficient, and that if the company is to get a temporary extension of contract it must offer a higher rate. * * * * * _Education For Prisoners._--Education by correspondence for prisoners in the Kansas Penitentiary would be possible if a plan outlined by the Chancellor of the University of Kansas should be adopted by the Board of Administration. He would have the privilege of the extension division of the University, including vocational training by correspondence, offered to the inmates of the Penitentiary at the expense of the State. In this connection it is worth while noting that more than 90 per cent. of 269 men committed to the Wisconsin State Penitentiary for murder in recent years were sent to work before they were 15 years of age, says the Bethlehem, Pa., Times. Of these 269 convicts, of whom a special study has been made, about one-third have never been to school, half reached the fourth grade and but 3.2 per cent. finished high school. * * * * * _Utilizing Prison Labor._--The Cleveland, O., Plaindealer, says that: Ohio expects to save more than a million in the construction of the new state prison in Madison county through the employment of convict labor. When Andrew L. Harris was governor it was estimated that to build the kind of a penitentiary the state needed would cost at least $2,600,000. The prison commission now declares a much finer institution than was then planned will be built for not to exceed $1,300,000. Prison labor constitutes the difference. Men in custody of the state will be utilized to make brick from material on the site, to cut and dress timber now growing on the tract for use in the buildings, and for the actual labor of erection.