“Another department should be assigned to those who are mentally weak, so that they could be put constantly under special guardianship. There are in the prisons, as we all know, many persons who, while not so far below the normal intelligence as to warrant the experts in declaring them to be insane, are nevertheless incapable of performing any useful work or of taking any benefit from prison agencies. In most States provision has been made for the removal of prisoners who are actually insane to an asylum specially provided for that class; but so far there has been no similar establishment created for the safe detention of prisoners who are found to be so far deficient in intelligence as to need the sort of treatment that is given in the schools for the feeble-minded. “Another humane department would be a hospital prison, an establishment that should combine the needed safeguards for custody with all the essential features for the most scientific and skillful treatment of the different ailments. To be sure it would be necessary to maintain a small infirmary in each prison for emergency cases, but all cases requiring long and continuous treatment would be removed to the hospital prison. “The last stage of all in such a plan as I outline should be a prison where the guardianship over the prisoner would be relaxed by degrees, so that he could approach his freedom in such a way as to regain some degree of self-reliance. “To make the general plan of a classified prison system harmonious and effective, the particular place of imprisonment should not be unalterably fixed at the outset. In effect to-day the court in Massachusetts does not absolutely determine the place of imprisonment. The central board has the power to make transfers from one prison to another, with the single exception that no person can be put into the state prison from another place. “I have seen in other places, however, many prisoners who manifestly belonged in the state prison. “It would be needless to recite cases of inequitable sentences that show the need of classification. As a type of many others I mention one instance where, through lack of knowledge of the prisoner’s antecedents, a justice sentenced to the reformatory a man who had been six times under imprisonment, including a term in the state prison, and as far as one human being can judge of another, had shown himself incapable of amendment or unwilling to accept the means of reformation. “Information that may be immediately available to the prison authorities when the prisoner is committed, so that they can assign him to his fit place, is in most cases lacking when the prisoner is before the court. The needed adjustment of prisoners I think could be made by a central authority having all places within its purview, after conference with the prison officials.