Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/545

Rh is not beautiful within. You enter the long vaulted gateway, and notice at once a heavy odor; but it is not very bad, as there is plenty of air. From this gateway there are two entrances; one, on the right, leading to the corps-de-garde, and the other, on the left, to the chapel and the hospital. From the latter comes the stench. Beyond these entrances there are more iron gates, and on the other side of them is the court. The court- yard is clean, but the odor in the cells is murderous. ... On the left extends a low building with twelve or thirteen windows. In it are the secret kámeras where they keep particularly important criminals. Here it is comparatively clean and neat — better than in any other part of the prison, not excepting the so-called "office of the warden." The bath- house is too small for such a prison, where the number of prisoners some- times reaches 2000, and the common cells and the hospital are incredibly dirty and stinking.

— " Afar," by M. I. Orfanof, p. 216.

In the Irkútsk city prison, typhus fever constituted 11.8 per cent. of all the sickness in 1888.

— Rep. of Chf. Pris. Adm. for 1888, p. 292.

THE ISHÍM PRISON.

The Ishím correspondent of the newspaper Sibír, after referring to the murder of a prison inspector there by a prisoner, says: "It has long ceased to be news that the prisons in Siberia are hot-beds not only of moral but of physical contagion. And it is not surprising that they should be such. Not long ago I happened to meet, in a temperature of forty degrees below zero [Reaum.], a whole party of exiles clothed merely in khaláts, without warm overcoats or felt boots. Among them were many young children — also thus unprotected. In the rooms of the police station, to which the prisoners were taken, the coughing of the emaciated little ones was incessant. The consequences soon became apparent. Throat diseases began to prevail in the city among children, and typhus fever among adults. It is said that in one exile party that recently arrived here there were thirty typhus patients. The condition of the local prison, packed as it is with prisoners [there were recently 380 instead of 250 — the number for which it was designed], is not such as to lessen the severity of the epidemic. The city physician, Dr. V. S. Volashkévich, recently took there the infection of typhus, and died after a short illness.

— Newspaper Sibír, No. 11, p. 10. Irkútsk, March 10, 1885.

The sick-rate in the Ishím prison in 1884 was 39.7 per cent. [computed upon the whole number of prisoners]. It has not since been reported.

— Rep. of Chf. Pris. Adm. for 1884, p. 217.