Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/128

 92 of replacing certain trades by prison industries and thereby tending to lower the standard of living. This latter objection, however, has less weight in the remoter districts of Siberia, where industrialism is scarcely developed as yet, and where certain small trades can very well be left in the hands of local prisoners without any serious interference with the economic life of the community. On the other hand, there are considerable advantages derived from the system. The prisoners' ordinary fare is poor, as it ought to be, and the conditions under which he is compelled to live are worse than that of his home, unless he engages in useful work and thereby earns some money. In this way punishment for the offence is accompanied by an incentive to become a more useful member of society, which is the general principle upon which all prisons ought to be run. It was quite obvious to me that, whatever advantages or disadvantages the system possessed, it had evidently been thought out carefully, and that the system in vogue in European Russia had been transferred with but slight modifications to the eastern parts of the Empire.