ABSTRACT
An overview of the PRC prison system Just as medical care in contemporary China combines time-honored treatments such as acupuncture and herbal concoctions with Western-style pharmaceuticals and injections, the contemporary Chinese prison system is a hybrid of traditional punishments such as internal exile to forced-labor camps and the Westerninfluenced warehousing of inmates in modern penitentiaries. The Western prison system which influenced its contemporary Chinese counterpart the most, the Soviet gulag, was itself an outgrowth of the pre-modern Tsarist Siberian katorga prisons that Fyodor Dostoyevsky brilliantly sketched from first-hand experience in his House of the Dead (1860). Yet the Soviet gulag also embodied utopian Western European philosophical convictions about robust and mammoth historical forces that swept all mere human individuals before their path; under tightly controlled channeling by a party vanguard trained to apotheosize manual labor, these historical forces would inevitably transform a flawed but highly malleable human tabula rasa into a “New Human” paragon of industriousness and civic-mindedness.
