Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/564

548 548 SIBERIA tion on account of their impracticability and of the absence of proper supervision. Forced colonization consists of the distribution and enrol- ment of the criminal colonists in the vohsts [cantons or districts of a province]. Upon reaching the places of their enrolment, after so long a period of imprisonment, they receive full freedom, and must look out for their own maintenance. Only the least spoiled part of them, and those accustomed to work, establish themselves in the places to which they are assigned, or seek employment in the gold-placers. The rest abandon their places of enrolment and wander about the country, giving them- selves up to laziness, and imposing themselves as a heavy burden upon the local population, at whose expense they are fed. The influence of these exiles upon the people of the country is very pernicious, since they carry into the villages and towns the seeds of depravity. As the Siberian population grows more and more prosperous, it manifestly feels, more and more, the heavy burden of these criminal colonists, and submits to their presence only as to an evil that is inevitable, protesting loudly, how- ever, in the mean time, against such an order of things. Penal servitude exists on the mainland and on the island of Sagkalin, but there are no special convict prisons for the confinement of convicts during the time that they are not at work. Hard labor itself is not defi- nitely regulated, and convicts either work very little or are engaged in labor which, although hard, is not of such a nature as to render prac- ticable the regular and constant supervision of the laborers. Such labor, for example, includes the erection of buildings of various kinds, the con- struction of roads, the working of gold-placers, the making of salt, and the mining of coal. All of this work is done outside the prisons. Kdtorga [penal servitude] on the mainland is centered, for the most part, in the Kara gold-placers, where last year [1881], in five prisons, there were 2939 men and 151 women. The convicts, as a whole, are divided into two classes — namely, those " on trial " and those " reforming." The " on trial " class includes all new-comers, who are kept in prison for certain fixed periods proportionate to the severity of their sentences. At the expira- tion of their prison terms, if their behavior has been such as to meet with approval, they are transferred to the " reforming " class, and have a right to live outside the prison walls. They generally occupy small houses built by themselves in the vicinity of the prisons. The place of penal servitude thus consists of a mass of Government prison-buildings surrounded by a greater or less number of houses belonging to private individuals or to convicts of the " reforming" class. It will be manifest that this renders the work of supervision extremely difficult, and hence the number of escapes from Kara is very large. In 1881 there escaped 272 persons, or more than 9 per cent, of the whole number of convicts. The work in the Kara gold- placers is not hard, and the convicts [who work side by side with free laborers] are well fed. In the Alexandrofski prison [near Irkutsk] all