In Russian and French Prisons | Page 5

system
of penal organization ought to be introduced.
The committee sketched such a system where cellular imprisonment
was utterly condemned, and the 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