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This article presents the impression of prisons in Italy. Observers to the prisons detect the excellence and ability of the administrative and disciplinary personnel. Italian prisons are still housed in ancient buildings which are structurally unsuited to the best forms of penitentiary construction. On the other hand, the men who superintend and manage prisons are equipped for their work. Prison directors must be university graduates with a law degree, except in the case of directors of penal institutions for the insane. The guards are members of the police force but especially picked for the work with military discipline.

The article presents the report of the committee of the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, on crime and immigration. The Executive Board of the Institute at the last annual meeting referred to this committee the following questions for investigation, and report: First: Do existing treaty provisions directly or by implication and interpretation sufficiently protect the alien's rights and remedies in the U.S.? Second: Do existing legal provisions, either in the statutes or in the treaties, sufficiently protect the U.S. from alien criminals? Third: Is it advisable to settle the status of the immigrant by international agreement?" Owing partly to the fact of the absence of the chairman of the committee in Europe, where he made study of Italian penal institutions, and largely to the impossibility of getting together a group of very busy men geographically scattered in different states, it has been impossible to prepare a committee's report as such, that is, a report which should embody the views of all or of a majority of the committee, whose membership is composed of men and women of very divers callings and of very divided opinions and convictions.

The article reports that the New York Immigration Commission showed that in the statutes of crimes by resident aliens in U.S., a substantial percentage of convictions are for violations of corporation ordinances and the sanitary code. Thus, next to the violations of corporation ordinances by immigrants come the violations of the sanitary code. During the year 1907, 3209 immigrants were held or committed in the magistrates' courts of the first division on this one charge. The recent legislation in New York state regarding inferior courts will help to carry out the recommendations of the New York Immigration Commission, which were as follows: that offenses against municipal ordinances be tried in the civil instead of the criminal courts, that fines should be imposed instead of imprisonment, and wherever possible (especially for violation of the sanitary code and the corporation ordinances) the responsible principal should be the party arraigned instead of, as now, his ignorant agent. These deficiencies and handicaps, which the writer has pointed out, are especially applicable in those courts where aliens most often get their object lessons in American injustice.