xtended to life prisoners, and secured the introduction in the
legislature of a bill to provide that life prisoners might be paroled when
they had served such a period as would have entitled them to their release
had they been sentenced to imprisonment for 35 years. The bill was drawn
by George M. Bennett of Minneapolis, who had taken a great deal of
interest in our case, and was introduced in the senate by Senator George
P. Wilson, of Minneapolis. As the good time allowances on a 35-year
sentence would cut it to between 23 and 24 years, we could have been
paroled in a few months had this bill passed. Although there was one
other inmate of the prison who might have come under its provisions, it
was generally known as the "Youngers' parole bill" and the feeling against
it was largely identified with the feeling against us. I am told, however,
since my release, that it would have passed at that session had it not
been for the cry of "money" that was used. There never was a dollar used
in Minnesota to secure our pardon, and before our release we had some of
the best men and women in the state working in our behalf, without money
and without price. But this outcry defeated the bill of 1899.

Still it did not discourage our friends on the outside.

At the next session of the legislature, 1901, there was finally passed the
bill which permitted our conditional parole, the pardon board not being
ready to grant us our full freedom. This bill provided for the parole of
any life convict who had been confined for twenty years, on the unanimous
consent of the board of pardons.

The bill was introduced in the house by Representative P. C. Deming of
Minneapolis, and among those who worked for its passage was Representative
Jay W. Phillips, who, as a boy, had been driven from the streets the day
we entered Northfield. Senator Wilson, who had introduced the bill which
failed in 1899, was again a staunch supporter and led the fight for us in
the senate.

The board of prison managers promptly granted the parole the principal
conditions of which were as follows:

"He shall not exhibit himself in any dime museum, circus theater, opera
house, or any other place of public amusement or assembly where a charge
is made for admission."

"He shall on the twentieth day of each month write the warden of the state
prison a report of himself, stating whether he had been constantly at work
during the last month, and if not, why not; how muc