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

[Theater] Imagine prison, fetters, unfreedom, long sad years ahead, a life as monotonous as drizzling rain on a dreary autumn day—and suddenly all these downtrodden and confined men are allowed for one little hour to let go, to have fun, to forget the oppressive dream, to set up a whole theater, and what a theater: to the pride and astonishment of the whole town, as if to say, see what kind of prisoners we are!

[On Christmas] Besides reverence for the great day, the prisoner unconsciously felt that by observing the holiday he was as if in contact with the whole world, that he was therefore not entirely an outcast, a lost man, a cut-off slice, that things in prison were the same as among other people.

The prisoner himself knows that he is a prisoner, an outcast, and he knows his place before his superior; but no brands, no fetters will make him forget that he is a human being. And since he is in fact, a human being, it follows that he must be treated as a human being. My God! Humane treatment may make a human being even of someone in whom the image of God has faded long ago.

[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.