Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/168

152 stand, here and there, along our railroads, while the worst of them were mere dog-kennels of driftwood and planks, in which it was almost incredible that human beings could exist throughout a Siberian winter.

The ostensible object of organizing a free command in connection with the Kará prisons was to encourage reformation among the convicts by holding out to them, as a reward for good behavior, the hope of obtaining release from confinement and an opportunity to better their condition. It does not seem to me, however, that this object has been attained. The free command is a demoralizing rather than a reforming agency; it promotes rather than discourages drunkenness and licentiousness; it does not guarantee, even to criminals who are actually reforming, any permanent amelioration of condition; and every decade it is the means of turning loose upon the Siberian population three or four thousand common criminals of the worst class. The custom of allowing the wives and children of convicts to accompany them to Siberia, and to live — sometimes alone and unprotected — in the free command, results necessarily in great demoralization. Such wives and children are supported — or at least aided to exist — by the Government, with the hope that they will ultimately exert a beneficial domestic influence over their criminal husbands and fathers; but the results rarely justify official anticipations. The women and girls in a great majority of cases go to the bad in the penal settlements, even if they have come uncorrupted through two or three hundred overcrowded étapes and forwarding prisons. There is little inducement, moreover, for a convict in the free command to reform and establish himself with his family in a comfortable house of his own, because he knows that in a comparatively short time he will be sent away to some other part of Siberia as a "forced colonist," and will lose all the material results of his industry and self-denial. He generally tries, therefore, to get through his term in the free command with as little labor and as