This is the feel-good part of the prison mess, when the high school drop-out somehow manages to win a Quixotic battle with the legal system. I'm not sure it made his overall time in prison any shorter (thanks to the unknown crime that made him NJSP #30786), but it must have made some kind of difference, or he never would have done it. The documents in the fossil record indicate the following steps in the process. 

Step 1) He learns, in Chapter 203 of the Laws of 1948, that according to R.S. 30:4-90 N.J.S.A.: 

"No transfers shall be made which will conflict with established age or sex limitations." 

Step 2) On January 4, 1955, an Assignment Judge of the Superior Court (Temporarily Assigned) named A.J. Cafiero writes a letter to one Harold B. Wells, Jr., Esquire, to represent my dad. 

Step 3) On March 31, 1955 he receives a verbatim copy of his sentencing on April 23, 1951 re: Accusation #3431 (for Escape). It is addressed to him in the New Jersey State Prison Farm in Rahway. 

Defendant was charged by Prosecutor Herbert T. Heisel, Jr., and entered a plea of guilty. Sentenced to N.J. Reformatory for Boys at Bordentown for an indeterminate period. [emphasis mine]

According to Indictment No. 28, he had already been in Bordentown when he tried to escape from there. (It looks like the stolen car incident described in Indictment No. 24 might also have happened while he had escaped.) So this accusation, which I don't have any other records for, was the one for which he received the "indeterminate" sentence that would end up being so key in his parole.  

Step 4) On June 17, 1955, he receives a letter from Harold B. Wells, Jr., Esquire, enclosed with a letter from Deputy Attorney General Eugene T. Urbaniak indicating that he will be granted 

parole effective as of December 6, 1951 on the indeterminate sentence upon which he was transferred to the State Prison while under the age of 21

A great lesson for Thomas J. Wingate. Persevere, observe details, and justice can be done. The kind of skills he didn't learn in school, but seemed to learn somehow in prison through the process of getting himself paroled. The kind of skills that would allow him to organize a rock and fossil collection so thoroughly and completely that he could find, at a glance, where every rock was. 

Who taught him this? I want to meet that man and say thank you, because I don't think my father grew up with that kind of patience and attention to the fine print. But he learned it, and somebody taught him. Somebody told him where to look in that book, coached him on how to work the system.