General-criminal prisons of the Russian Empire in the XIX century (on the example of the Orenburg province)

The paper attempts to provide, on the basis of archival and published materials, a brief description of the state of general prisons in the Russian Empire in the 19th century on the example of the Orenburg province. In the first half of the XIX century, many prison buildings were in a dilapidated state, most of them were wooden. The prisoners suffered from overcrowding, they were not separated by sex and age, the sick were kept together with the healthy ones, they were hungry, they lived in begging. Very often the premises for prisons were private rental houses. There were no medical personnel in prisons, there were epidemics that led to a huge increase in mortality. As for the work, in the first half of the XIX century in prison locks and guards it was introduced in the rarest cases, since there were no special rooms for this. In the post-reform period, many prison premises were repaired, premises began to be rented for hospitals, the prisoners’ diet improved in the 1980s. The payment for arrest labor was introduced, the «educational» activity in prisons improved. Despite the measures taken by the government, the state of ordinary prisons in the southern Urals throughout the XIX century was still deplorable due to the fact that there was not enough money, or the local administration was not interested in improving the situation of the prisoners and the state of the prisons themselves.