After the hopeful beginning in improved penal legislation made by the Legislature of Pennsylvania two years ago in the enactment of a probation, indeterminate sentence and parole law, the work done and left undone by the recent session is, to say the least, most discouraging. Not only did a number of admirable bills receive no consideration whatever, but the law referred to above, which the Committee on Criminal Law Reform in its report at the last Prison Congress (Washington, 1910) pronounced “admirable,” was so amended as virtually to eliminate from it the vital principle underlying the indeterminate sentence and parole. The act of 1909 was based on a very careful study of the writings of the most advanced penologists, and of the statutes of those progressive states that have introduced the indeterminate sentence and parole with the largest measure of success. Its viewpoint was that of those who seek the reformation of the wrongdoer, and not of those who still have in their minds the old idea of retributive justice only; it made a break with the old codes, aimed to deal with the man and not with his crime, and had regard to his future rather than to his past; and possibly this radical departure from the traditional mode of thought and procedure, and the introduction of something evidently so new to many legal minds in Pennsylvania, though no longer so in some other States, was responsible for the hostility which the law encountered here and there. Section 6 of said law reads as follows: