Pamela Shropshire’s Reviews > Notes from a Dead House > Status Update

[He goes on to talk about how one person robbed and killed a peasant, and the peasant only had an onion on him, while another killed to defend a woman from a would-be rapist; then men like Gazin, who cut the throats of children for the pleasure of it. Yet all were sentenced to hard labor, even the length of their sentences might differ.]

But I remember being occupied most of all by one thought, which afterwards constantly pursued me during all my life in prison – a partly insoluble thought, insoluble for me, even now: about the inequality of punishment for the same crime… for instance, two criminals, each killed a man; the circumstances of both cases are weighed and both wind up with the same punishment.

Of course, prisons, and the system of forced labor do not correct the criminal; they only punish him and ensure society against the evildoer’s further attempts on its peace and quiet. In the criminal himself, prison, and the most intense forced labor, develop only hatred, a thirst for forbidden pleasures, and a terrible light-mindedness.

All these people worked under the lash, consequently they were idle, consequently they were depraved: if they were not depraved before, they became so at hard labor.

I even knew murderers among them so cheerful, so never-thoughtful, that you could wager their conscience had never reproached them at all. But there were also the gloomy ones, who were almost always silent.

Later, I understood that, besides the lack of freedom, besides the forced labor, there was one more torment in prison life that was almost worse than all the others. This was forced communal cohabitation.

For example, could I ever have imagined how terrible and tormenting it would be that, and all the 10 years of my term, not once, not for a single minute, would I be alone? At work always under guard, at home with my 200 comrades, and never once, never once alone!

…noise, din, guffawing, swearing, the clanking of chains, fumes and soot, shaven heads, branded faces, ragged clothes, everything abused, besmeared . . . yes, man survives it all! Man is a creature who gets used to everything…