In Russian and French Prisons | Page 5

subdivision of the prisoners into groups of from ten to twenty in each room, short sentences, and productive and well-paid work in common were advocated. An appeal was to be made to the best energies of Russia in order to transform her prisons into reformatories. Transbaikalia was declared ready to transform her own prisons on these lines without imposing any fresh expenses upon the budget of the Empire. The kinds of work which could be done by prisoners were indicated, and the conclusion was that prisons ought to, and might, support themselves if properly organized. As to the new men and women necessary for such a reorganization of penal institutions on new principles, the Committee was sure of finding them; and while an honest jailer under the present system is very rare, there was no doubt that a new departure in the penal system would find no lack of new honest men.
I must confess that at that time I still believed that prisons could be reformatories, and that the privation of liberty is compatible with moral amelioration... but I was only twenty years old.
All this work took several months. And by this time Reaction became more and more in favour at the Winter Palace. The Polish insurrection gave to Reactionaries the long-expected opportunity for throwing off their masks and for openly advocating a return to the old principles of the time of Serfdom. The good intentions of 1859-62 were forgotten at the Court; new men came into favour with Alexander II. and were admirably successful in working upon his feeble character and his fears. New circulars were sent out by the Ministries; but these circulars--couched in a far less elegant and far more bureaucratic style--mentioned no more reforms, and insisted, instead, on the necessity of strong rule and discipline.
One day the Governor of Transbaikalia received an order to leave his post at once and return to Irkutsk, where he was left en disponibilit. He had been denounced: he had treated the exiled Mikhailoff too well; he had permitted him to stay on a private mine in the district of Nertchinsk; he sympathized too much with the Poles. A new Governor came to Transbaikalia, and our report on prisons had to be revised again. The new Governor would not sign it. We fought as much as we could to maintain its conclusions. We made concessions as to the style, but we insisted on the general conclusions of the report, and we did this so firmly that finally the Governor signed it and sent it to St. Petersburg.
What has become of it since? Surely it is still lying in some portfolios at the Ministry. For the next ten years the reform of prisons was completely forgotten. In 1872, however, new committees were nominated for the same purpose at St. Petersburg, and again in 1877-78, and on several succeeding occasions. New men elaborated new schemes; new reports were written criticizing again and again the old system. But the old system remains untouched. Nay, the attempts at making a new departure have been, by some fatality, mere returns to the old-fashioned type of a Russian ostrog.
True, several central prisons have since been erected in Russia, and hard-labour convicts are kept there before being sent to Siberia, for terms varying, from four to six years. To what purpose? Probably to reduce their numbers by the awful mortality in these places. Seven such prisons have been erected of late--at Wilno, Simbirsk, Pskov, Tobolsk, Perm, and two in the province of Kharkoff. But--official reports say so--they have been modelled on the very same type as the prisons of old. "The same filth, the same idleness of the prisoners, the same contempt for the most primary notions of hygiene," says a semi-official report. All together they contained an aggregate of 2464 men in 1880--too much for their capacity, too little to noticeably diminish the numbers of hard-labour convicts transported to Siberia. A new and terrible punishment inflicted on the convicts to no purpose,--that is all that they have accomplished after having swallowed millions from the budget.
Exile, in the meantime, remains very much what it was in 1862. Only one important modification has been introduced. It proved cheaper to transport the nearly 20,000 people yearly sent to Siberia (two-thirds of them without trial) on horses between Perm and Tumen[1] --that is from the Kama to the basin of the Obi--and thence on barges towed by steamers to Tomsk, instead of sending them on foot. And so they are transported now. Besides, the extraction of silver from the Nertchinsk mines having been nearly abandoned, no exiles are sent to these most unhealthy mines, some of which, like Akatui, were in the worst repute. But a scheme is now afloat for reopening these mines; and in the meantime a new hell,