in evident anticipation of our visit. Throughout the prison the men seemed to be wholly separated from the women and children, and in the kámeras devoted to the latter there was less overcrowding, more cleanliness, and purer air.
From the forwarding prison we went to the general city prison, which stood about a hundred yards away on the same street, and which consisted of a large two-story building of brick covered with white stucco and roofed with tin. In general type it resembled a little the forwarding prison of Tiumén; but it differed from the latter in having an interior courtyard 75 or 100 feet square which, by means of graveled walks and prim geometrical flower-beds, had been tinned into a sort of garden and which served as a place of exercise for the inmates. This prison was erected in 1861 at a cost of 62,000 rúbles, and was intended to accommodate 450 prisoners. At the time of our visit it held 743, and the warden admitted to me that it sometimes contained 1500. According to Mr. S. S. Popóf, who made a special study of this prison and who wrote a monograph upon it for the newspaper Sibír, no less than 2000 prisoners have at times been packed into its kámeras In other words, every cell has been made to hold more than four times the number of prisoners for which it was intended.[1] The results of such overcrowding I have already described several times in my sketches of other Siberian prisons. The air in the kámeras was somewhat less poisonous than in the forwarding prison of Tiumén, but it was nevertheless very foul, and many piteous complaints of it were made by the prisoners, both to Captain Makófski and to me, as we passed through the cells. The condition of the atmosphere in the overcrowded and badly ventilated hospital seemed to me to be something terrible. Although we went through only two or three wards, and that hastily, and although I held my breath
- ↑ "The Prisoners of the Irkútsk Prison Castle, and their Maintenance," by S. S. Popóf, Annual of the newspaper Sibír p. 210. Irkútsk, 1876.
