of their exercising any educative influence is excluded by the fact that since the term of imprisonment is short, and the cost of transport considerable, the child will be confined in the nearest prison, instead of being sent to some special and suitable place of confinement. Many children are even pleased at being sent to prison, regarding their sentence as a desirable interlude in school work. This difficulty is not met by postponing the term of imprisonment to the holiday season. The child leaves prison to return to school. If it is despised by its schoolmates, it sinks lower; if it is regarded as a hero, the effect is no less corrupting. Imprisonment for a child must take no other form than that of education under strict discipline. If a short term of imprisonment is ordered, solitary confinement is essential. If a child must be sent to prison, the use of the common prison is inadmissible, and a children’s wing in a general prison is hardly better; a special prison for children is essential, if only for the reason that, unless we have a comparatively large number of young persons assembled together, it is more difficult to arrange for the proper distribution of occupations (manual work of various kinds). From these considerations we may draw the following conclusions: Society stands quietly by, waiting until juvenile criminals grow up and begin to commit serious offences. Our prisons are the true high schools of criminality. The present prison system is the most effective factor in the production of crime; to such an extent is this true, that if we discharge a juvenile offender with a caution, there is less likelihood that he will commit another criminal offence than if we had sent him to prison. The accuracy of these views is now more and more widely recognised; and in the case of juvenile offenders, imprisonment, formerly the rule, is now quite exceptional.