In Russian and French Prisons | Page 6

worse than Akatui, has been devised. Hardlabour convicts are sent now to die on the Sakhalin island.
Finally, I must mention that new tapes have been built on the route, 2000 miles long, between Tomsk and Sryetensk, on the Shilka,--this space being still traversed on foot by the exiles. The old tapes were falling to pieces; it was impossible to repair these heaps of rotten logs, and new tapes have been erected. They are wider than the old ones, but the parties of convicts being also more numerous, the overcrowding and the filth in these tapes are the same as of old.
What further "improvements" can I mention in glancing over these five-and-twenty years? I was nearly going to forget the House of Detention at St. Petersburg, the showprison for foreigners, with 317 cells and several rooms for keeping an aggregate of 600 men and 100 women awaiting trial. But that is all. The same old, dark and damp, and filthy lockups--the ostrogs--may be seen at the entrance of each provincial town in Russia; and all has remained in these ostrogs as it was twenty-five years ago. Some new prisons have been erected here and there, some old ones have been repaired; but the system, and the treatment of prisoners, have remained unaltered; the old spirit has been transported in full in the new buildings; and to see a new departure in the Russian penal institutions we must wait for some new departure in Russian life as a whole. At present, if there is some change, it is not for the best. Whatever the defects of the old prisons, there was still a breath of humanitarianism in 1862, which penetrated in a thousand ways, even into the jails. But now, the openly-avowed ideal of Alexander III. being his grandfather Nicholas, the Administration, too, seek their ideals in the old drunken soldiers patronized by the "Gendarme of Europe." "Keep Russia in urchin-gloves!" they say at the Gatchina Palace; "Keep them in urchin-gloves!" they repeat in the prisons. Notes
1 The Siberian railway being now opened along the whole of this distance, they will be transported by rail.
CHAPTER 2
RUSSIAN PRISONS
It is pretty generally recognized in Europe that altogether our penal institutions are very far from being what they ought, and no better indeed than so many contradictions in action of the modern theory of the treatment of criminals. The principle of the lex talionis--of the right of the community to avenge itself on the criminal--is no longer admissible. We have come to an understanding that society at large is responsible for the vices that grow in it, as well as it has its share in the glory of its heroes; and we generally admit, at least in theory, that when we deprive a criminal of his liberty, it is to purify and improve him. But we know how hideously at variance with the ideal the reality is. The murderer is simply handed over to the hangman; and the man who is shut up in a prison is so far from being bettered by the change, that he comes out more resolutely the foe of society than he was when he went in. Subjection, on disgraceful terms, to humiliating work gives him an antipathy to allkinds of labour. After suffering every sort of humiliation at the instance of those whose lives are lived in immunity from the peculiar conditions which bring man to crime--or to such sorts of it as are punishable by the operations of the law--he learns to hate the section of society to which his humiliation belongs, and proves his hatred by new offences against it.
If the penal institutions of Western Europe have failed thus completely to realize the ambitious aim on which they justify their existence what shall we say of the penal institutions of Russia? The incredible duration of preliminary detention; the disgusting circumstances of prison life; the congregation of hundreds of prisoners into small and dirty chambers; the flagrant immorality of a corps of jailers who are practically omnipotent, whose whole function is to terrorize and oppress, and who rob their charges of the few coppers doled out to them by the State; the want of labour and the total absence of all that contributes to the moral welfare of man; the cynical contempt for human dignity, and the physical degradation of prisoners--these are the elements of prison life in Russia. Not that the principles of Russian penal institutions are worse than those applied to the same institutions in Western Europe. I am rather inclined to hold the contrary. Surely, it is less degrading for the convict to be employed in useful work in Siberia, than to spend his life in picking oakum, or in climbing the steps of a wheel; and--to compare two evils--it is more humane to employ