Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/565

549 the work is domestic, and penal servitude consists merely of imprisonment with light labor. Still less hard is the work of convicts leased to the owners of private gold-placers and salt-works. Their situation differs little from that of free laborers. Among the convicts, however, are not a few feeble or decrepit persons, who are unfit for work and who are depressed by sickness. Their condition is burdensome in the extreme, and for most of them I can see only one end — the grave. The prison hospitals and asylums are in a lamentable condition. It is greatly to be regretted that there are many children in penal servitude — children who have come from places of exile or who have been born in Siberia. At Kará there is little supervision over them, and little probability, on account of the lack of funds, that the children's asylum, which has been authorized, will soon become a reality.

Unorganized and unregulated penal servitude of this sort fills all the surrounding country with brodyágs [runaway convicts], and overcrowds all the Siberian prisons. Even at the mines there are great numbers of recidivists, formerly convicts, who have escaped and been recaptured. The impossibility of establishing the identity of persons arrested without passports often results in the condemnation of a captured brodyág to four years of penal servitude, when, before his escape, he had belonged to a class condemned to ten or more years of penal servitude. Escape, therefore, besides giving him temporary freedom, lessens considerably his punishment, even after recapture and a new trial. When a convict finishes his term of penal servitude he goes into forced colonization in the same way that a forced colonist does if banished directly from one of the interior provinces. The Kará gold-placers are situated on the bank of the river Shílka, and steamers from the lower Amúr come directly to the Kará landing. There was a project to bring convicts to Kará around the world and up the Amúr; but, although it was considered and found feasible, it has never been carried into effect for the reason that the volunteer fleet is not able to provide the necessary transportation.

Penal servitude on the island of Saghalín is organized in the same way as at Kará, but the work at the former place is much harder, and the place itself is wilder and more solitary. This, with the prospect of remaining on a distant island as a settler after the completion of a term of hard labor, makes the lot of a Saghalín convict a very hard one, and one that corresponds much more nearly with the punishment which the law has in view. It should be remembered, however, that the transportation of convicts to Saghalín by sea is very convenient, and is much easier for the convict himself than the agonizing journey across the