A large and increasing number of our prison population come sooner or later before the Board of Parole for its consideration and judgment, the number of applicants eligible for parole having grown more than four hundred per cent since September, 1907. The hope of early and favorable action furnishes the strongest incentive for the prisoner to conduct himself without fault in his cell, in the workshop and in the school. The family and friends on the outside bestir themselves with equal zeal to obtain suitable offers of employment (which are always investigated by the Board), a proper place of abode, and to enlist the interest of good people generally to lend a helping hand to the released prisoner. As an illustration of the working of the system we may take the April meeting of the Board of Parole, under the chairmanship of Mr. Cornelius V. Collins, who has since retired as State Superintendent of Prisons, in which position his administration of the penal institutions under his control, from the point of view of broad humanity and enlightened philosophy, has been a model for civilization. (The consensus of the International Prison Congress, comprising delegates from forty-seven nations, that met in Washington last October, after a tour of inspection of the penal institutions of the United States, was that nowhere else in the world had the prisons so nearly solved the problem of the reformation of the criminal as in the State of New York.) There were some sixty men who applied for parole at the April meeting of the Board at Sing Sing, and of these thirty applications were granted, and I may safely assert that in the case of every prisoner granted his parole it was better, both for the State and the individual, that he should be given the opportunity again to test his capacity in the struggle for an honest livelihood. In each instance the application for parole, signed by the prisoner, contained a statement as to his regular trade, profession or vocation, an account of his occupation in prison, his hopes and expectations on his release, with full details as to prospective employment while on parole and residence during that period. This application was accompanied by a written statement made by the prisoner at the beginning of his term, and by separate reports of the warden, the prison clerk, the principal keeper, the prison physician, the prison chaplain, the principal of the prison school and the District Attorney who had prosecuted the case originally. Each prisoner’s preliminary statement, filled out and signed on entering prison, covered about thirty-five points, including his own version of his “criminal history,” particulars of his conviction, family relations, information relating to drinking habits and insanity in the family, his own account of the particular crime for which he was convicted and his industrial history, with the names of his employers.