While we have thus been dreaming, tardily and ineffectually putting into effect the aspirations of a long-distant past, a new penology has come into being, based not on humanitarian sentiment or on “the common sense of most,” but on the scientific study of the delinquent and his environment. New sciences of psychology, psychiatry and sociology have been forged to meet the conditions of the new day and these have furnished us with a new basis for penological experimentation. We have learned that the criminal is not merely a person who has in the exercise of an unfettered will chosen the evil rather than the good, but a person of complex personality shaped by heredity and environment to what he is, none the less a menace to society than the older conception made him, not the less requiring restraint and correction, but demanding and deserving individual treatment according to the nature which has been developed in him. We have learned from recent scientific study of the most rigorous and trustworthy sort that from 50 to 60 per cent. of the inmates of our correctional institutions are abnormal--feeble-minded, insane, psychopathic--to the point of irresponsibility, to all intents and purposes the same kind of people that fill our hospitals for the insane and institutions for the feeble-minded. We have also learned, from sociological case studies, that a very large proportion of those that the psychiatrist would class as normal are the victims of neglected childhood and of the depraving influences of the institutions in which they have spent a great part of their young lives. It seems clear that this new knowledge makes for a new classification, based not, like that of the Elmira system, on behavior in confinement, nor, like that of the current penology, on the character of the crime committed, but on the exact study of the individual and that the treatment accorded him must be adapted to the results of such study. Here, then, is the new opportunity for a further advance out of this slough of despond--an opportunity not inferior to that which this Commonwealth so superbly grasped in its heroic youth--to bring its penal administration into conformity with the newer conceptions of delinquency. Tinkering the old machine is not enough. It must be remodeled altogether. Adding to the powers of a board of inspectors here, curbing them there, setting up new boards and commissions to direct the doing of this, to restrain the doing of that--all these are but a part of the old game, which will after all continue to be played in very much the old perfunctory way. What is demanded is a genuine reconstruction of the penal system of the Commonwealth, one which shall, with as little disturbance to the existing management of the several institutions as possible, put at their service all the resources of the new knowledge of crime and its treatment. It is the purpose of this report to suggest the lines of this future development of our penal system. III.