Mr. Alexander Johnson, General Secretary National Conference of Charities and Correction, Indianapolis, Indiana, spoke on “The Reformation of Jails.” Many county jails, he declared, are a blot on civilization. Should this be the case when we seek the reformation of the prisoner? Reform has begun at the top of the prison system, but the jails have made little progress upward, and a great number deserve to be called “schools of vice.” What is the remedy? The physical condition of the county jail must be improved. Each prisoner should be separately confined. The fundamental error is that the jails are used for two dissimilar purposes: for men awaiting trial, and for men who are sentenced. The two do not belong together. I have seen these two classes together in the same cell, and treated perfectly alike. When a man has been convicted he no longer belongs to the county, but to the State, and should be sent to a State institution. Then the jail would remain only as a place of detention for those awaiting trial. But why the State? Because the county would hardly be justified in going to the expense of supporting a real work-house. Another reform imperatively needed is speedier trials. It is infamous to hold a man in jail for months awaiting trial. “I hope the time will come when the question will be, ‘What kind of a man is this, that we may fit him for society.’ When we make our prisons hospitals for the moral reformation of men, we will realize that the jail will be the place in which to begin.” “The Juvenile Court: Its Uses and Limitations,” was the title of a paper by Dr. Hastings H. Hart, Superintendent of the Illinois Children’s Home and Aid Society, Chicago. The juvenile court is an evolution. Some twenty States have juvenile court laws--all within about six years. This evolution is still in progress, and the matter still in its infancy. The juvenile court is founded on three great ideas: 1. The value of the child for its own sake and for the community. 2. The abandonment of the _lex talionis_, _i. e._, the infliction of a punishment commensurate with the wrong done. This is impossible as well as a wrong. No man is wise enough to adjust the punishment accurately to the crime. 3. The recognition of the responsibility of the mother State for the children, especially for the erring and neglected ones.