The Prison Association of New York is taking up the study of mentally deficient criminals, and has appointed several committees to inquire into what can be done to deal with their cases. An average of nearly four out of ten inmates of Elmira Reformatory are below the ordinary standard of intelligence and are not able to take advantage of the institution, but there is no place to which they can be sent except such establishments as Dannemora State Hospital for the Insane, where association with hardened criminals will destroy all hope of their reformation. The Prison Association believes that special institutions should be established for the delinquents. At a meeting of the Committee on Defective Delinquents, held last Thursday, a letter from Dr. Frank Christian, senior physician of the Elmira Reformatory, was read, in which it was stated: Daily contact with our inmates must impress one that a large proportion are far below a normal status. Our examinations show 39 per cent. mentally defective and 70 per cent. below a normal physical standard. We have always made allowance for these defectives and have excused their failures in school and overlooked their shortcomings in deportment. The superintendent of the reformatory has recommended that a law be passed at the present session of the Legislature allowing us to transfer the imbeciles to a custodial asylum. They really have no place in a reformatory, and are a hindrance to its work for the brighter boys. Dr. Robert E. Lamb, Superintendent of Matteawan State Hospital for the Insane, has also written to the Prison Association stating that certain cases under his care are “practically on the border line between criminal and lunatic, sometimes with intermixing of the two,” and declaring that proper study of this class of criminals would be of service to the commonwealth. Dr. North, Superintendent of the Dannemora State Hospital for the Insane, in advocating a thorough study of the delinquent, especially the adolescent delinquent, from this point of view, has said: “From time to time we receive patients from the reformatories who are so defective that they could not by any possibility enter the reformatory routine and benefit by it. As they are under sentence, there is no place for them but this institution, but here they meet more hardened criminals, and while we can improve their condition in some ways, their stay in a hospital of this character should not be prolonged. Had they been recognized as defective at the time of trial, as it would seem that they should have been, they could have been more suitably provided for elsewhere.”