In Russian and French Prisons | Page 6

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, 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