It is not merely in public and official capacity that women are helping in the improvement of the conditions of correction. They are to be found among the leading students and original investigators who concern themselves with prison methods. REFORMS One of the most courageous and useful pieces of prison investigation was that undertaken in 1914 in Auburn prison, New York, by Elizabeth Watson and Madeleine Doty, a member of the State Commission for Prison Reform, who voluntarily incarcerated themselves in the prison under disguise to study at first hand the conditions under which women were confined there. Both of these women were experienced investigators, the former having worked with child labor committees for years and the latter, a lawyer, having worked with the juvenile court. They found bad physical conditions which they were unable to endure themselves for more than a few days: bad food, commingling of sick and well, and other physical evils. They also condemned the lack of classification of youthful and hardened offenders, the inadequacy of the educational system and the failure to teach such occupations as would enable the prisoners to be self-supporting on their release. They deplored the fact that the prisoners were not allowed to form a single tie—social or economic—that could help them in attempts to live a normal life later. As a direct result of the report of Miss Watson and Miss Doty, John B. Riley, State Superintendent of Prisons, ordered a number of changes to be made in institutional procedure at that prison: the extension of the letter-writing privilege; more conversation among prisoners; less confinement; more water; more reading matter. These reforms were to apply only to that institution. The superintendent will ask the legislature, however, for a new prison for women. Another important investigation—that of the convict labor system—was supported by the Consumers’ League and carried out by Julian Leavitt, who showed the effect of this system on the outside labor market as well as on the prison workers themselves. Men were found to be working at women’s trades and thus undercutting women workers in the regular field at the same time that they were learning nothing which would serve them on their release. That other women in addition to those in the Consumers’ League have been aroused to this grave evil is shown in the agitation against it by Kate Barnard, Commissioner of Charities and Corrections of Oklahoma. Martha Falconer is working to destroy this system in Maryland’s institutions for delinquent children. LEGAL AID