confinement, while the remainder were living in barracks, or in little cabins of their own, outside the prison walls.
The penal term of a Russian convict at the mines is divided into two periods or stages. During the first of these periods he is officially regarded as "on probation," and is held in prison under strict guard. If his conduct is such as to merit the approval of the prison authorities, he is released from confinement at the end of his probationary term and is enrolled in a sort of ticket-of-leave organization known as the "free command." He is still a hard-labor convict; he receives his daily ration from the prison, and he cannot step outside the limits of the penal settlement without a permit; but he is allowed to live with other "reforming" criminals in convict barracks, or with his family in a separate house of his own; he can do extra work for himself in his leisure hours, if he feels so disposed, and he enjoys a certain amount of freedom. At the end of this second or "reforming" period he is sent as a "forced colonist" to some part of Eastern Siberia for the remainder of his life.
The prisons connected with the Kará penal establishment at the time of our visit were seven in number, and were scattered along the Kará River for a distance of about twenty miles. The slow but steady movement of the working convict force up-stream in the search for gold had left the Lower Diggings and Ust Kará prisons so far behind that their inmates could no longer walk in leg-fetters to and from the placers, and a large number of them were therefore living in enforced idleness. The direct supervision of the common-criminal prisons was intrusted to smatrítels, or wardens, who reported to Major Pótulof; and the prison buildings were guarded by detachments of Cossacks from the Kará battalion, which numbered about one thousand men. The two political prisons — one at the Lower Diggings for men, and the other at Ust Kará for women — were not under the control of Major Pótulof,
