Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/562

546 Siberia has served for a long time as a place to which are sent, from all parts of the empire, the more heinous class of criminals, who have been sentenced to penal servitude, forced colonization, or banishment. In addition to these criminals, there are sent to Siberia persons turned over by communes to the disposition of the Government, and persons who have been imprisoned for crime and whom the communes will not afterward receive. Hard-labor convicts and forced colonists are sent to Eastern Siberia exclusively. Communal exiles go thither in very small numbers. Penal servitude is centralized in the Alexandrófski prison near Irkútsk, at Kará in the territory of the Trans-Baikál, and on the island of Saghalín. Small gangs of hard-labor convicts are also sent to mining establishments and salt-works and to gold-placers. Forced colonists are distributed, in accordance with the nature of their sentences and the directions of the Prikáz o Sílnikh, throughout the provinces and territories of Eastern Siberia, with the exception of the Amúr region. To the latter are sent only an insignificant number of forced colonists — mostly hard-labor convicts from the island of Saghalín, who finished their terms of penal servitude before the year 1880, when the sending of forced colonists from there to the mainland was stopped.

Notwithstanding the length of time that the deportation of criminals has been practised, the exile system and penal servitude in Eastern Siberia are in the most unsatisfactory state. In the chief administration there is not even a department for their superintendence and regulation, while the exile bureaus in the provinces are not organized in a manner commensurate with the importance of the work that they have to do, and are prejudicial rather than useful to the service. The étapes, forwarding prisons, and prisons of other kinds, with the most insignificant exceptions, are tumble-down buildings, in bad sanitary condition, cold in winter, saturated with miasm, and, to crown all, affording very little security against escapes. The prisons in Nízhni Údinsk, Chíta, Nérchinsk, Blagovéishchensk, and particularly Nikoláivsk, astound one by their bad condition. The reasons for this melancholy state of the prisons are many. In the first place, the prisons of the empire generally, with the exception of the principal ones recently erected, are not remarkable for their good qualities, and the Siberian prisons are bad particularly because they were built quickly, with insufficient means, and almost wholly without supervision, either administrative or technical, the latter especially on account of the lack of architects. The last reason is applicable even now to prisons in process of erection. The prison at Vérkhni Údinsk,