Before the Qing Dynasty, prisons were in prisons, and prisons were not for food. The official only bears the burden when the prisoner is unable to solve it.
In the "Prison Officer's Order" of the Western Jin Dynasty, it was stipulated that all prisoners who "went to their homes far away and had no pay" were "ruled" by the public family.
The Tang Dynasty's "Prison Officer's Order" stipulates, "Those who are imprisoned at home and are far away from the salary, the official gives clothing and food, and the family members are charged according to the number." This means that if the family members of Lu Yuan are unable to send living expenses for a while, the government will pay them in advance and return them after the family members come.
The Song Dynasty demanded, "Those who are imprisoned without food should pay twenty yuan for Lin'an Day and fifteen yuan for the outer road." Judging from this regulation, the daily food standard for Prisoners of the Song Dynasty was 20 and 15 yuan.
In the Qing Dynasty, the expenditure on imprisonment underwent a qualitative change, the food expenses were no longer paid by the prisoner's family, and the prisoners in prison, like the officials who went to work, began to "eat imperial grain", and the standard was not low: "One liter of rice per day, one piece of silk clothing for cold." ”
In addition, all the daily necessities necessary for imprisonment were also provided by the government. The Punishment Rules for punishment stipulate that prisoners "shall be permanently expelled from all prison fees that should be prohibited", that is, all daily necessities in prison will henceforth be rationed by the prison and will no longer be collected from prisoners.
It seems that the conditions for going to jail are not bad, so can the desperate poor people deliberately commit crimes and strive to go to jail to eat "imperial food"?
The truth, however, is that regulations are regulated, and the system is often very different from what is practiced in real life.
Let's start with the jailers
Jailers belong to a type of service, and in ancient times the legal status of service was very low. The "Imperial Literature Examination" records that the advocates and their descendants are not allowed to take the examination and donation prison, and if there are those who change their surnames and names, and if they are confused to report for the examination, in addition to reprimanding the revolutionary, they will violate the law of 100 rods.
Moreover, the salaries of the servants are usually very meager.
According to the 26th edition of the Qianlong Chronicle of Sichuan in the Qing Dynasty, the average official in the county was only 6 taels of silver per person per year. That's about ten a day.
At that time, the price of rice in Jiangyou County was about 1.5 taels per stone, and the county officials could only buy 4 stones of rice a year with a salary of 6 taels of silver, about 1200 jin, according to the current 3 yuan a catty of rice, a person had a salary of 3600 yuan a year, which was absolutely unable to support the family.
So how to solve the livelihood problem? It depended on the ugly fees (gray income) tacitly approved by the imperial court. And the jailer relies on squeezing oil from the prisoner, and it is naturally impossible for you, a poor ghost who has no money, and thinks of eating and drinking in it.
First of all, when a new prisoner goes to prison, he will definitely encounter a group of officials who want to beat you up. In fact, it is to ask you for money, do not give or do not have money to give, then this killing stick is inevitable.
Qing Dynasty literary scholar Fang Ku, Kangxi fifty years of the "Nanshan Collection" case, because of the preface to the "Nanshan Collection", was connected to jiangning county prison. Wrote an article called "Miscellaneous Notes in Prison."
He wrote: In March of the fifty-first year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1715), I was in the Prison of the Punishment Department, and every day I saw three or four prisoners die and pulled out of the hole in the wall. Du Xianling of Hongdong County, where a jailed piece, said he died of illness. Now the sky is right, the death is still relatively small, in the past more than a dozen people died every day. ......
At the same time as Fang Bao, three other people were arrested and sentenced
A man paid a bribe of thirty-two pieces of silver, and his bones were wounded a little, and he was raised for a month.
The other man bribed twice as much silver as the former, and his skin and flesh were slightly injured, and it would be fine in ten days.
The third man took twice as much silver and could walk as usual that night.
Sima Qian, the author of the "Chronicle of History", was imprisoned for the Li Ling case that year. In prison, Sima Qian was tortured by the jailer because he had no money to pay bribes, and when he got to the back, Sima Qian, who was extremely hungry and scared, saw the prison guard coming, and he quickly prostrated his head.
"Now hand in hand, by the wooden rope, by the skin, by the list, hidden in the wall." At this time, when the jailer is seen, he grabs the ground, and the disciple is worried. Who? The momentum of the Ji Wei Covenant also. ”
Not giving food and torturing the jailers are normal operations. Not only do they fight, but they also have to let their families know and force them to send money to them before stopping.
Secondly, after the prisoner was sent to prison, he was carrying a torture device. Torture instruments generally have shackles, shackles, shackles, etc., which are very heavy. If the prisoner wants to remove his or her own torture device, he needs to add money.
There is a kind of torture: you wear heavy wooden shackles and chains, stand on the ground with extremely uncomfortable bulges, and be remedied by the most grumpy supervisors, and are not allowed to come down. The bump can only hold one and a half feet, and you have to stand on it to be punished, and if it falls, it is recalculated.
The law stipulates that you stand for two or three moments at a time, but the actual implementation often times out, often making you stand for several hours, accompanied by verbal abuse and flogging.
The shackles on the prisoner's neck are not very heavy according to the regulations, weighing twenty or thirty pounds, but they definitely make you feel bad to death. And many prisons deliberately kill the whole person, letting people wear a hundred pounds of shackles, or even one hundred and twenty pounds. After this shackle is put on, the skin on the neck will soon be cut down, and the flesh and blood will be eroded, revealing white bones.
The government did not know that this was a common practice, and ordered several times and three times: "Although one hundred and twenty pounds of shackles are used in the case, they are not used frequently, and in the future, the hundred pounds of heavy shackles in all prefectures, prefectures, and counties must not be used lightly." however...... If the state and county could easily use this kind of heavy shackle to kill people in minutes, why did the prisoner's family obediently pay filial respect to the elders?
You wear such shackles to the penalty station........ Even if you don't stand penalized, you can't stand it.
Fei Chu confronted the official, standing up improperly and giving up his hand, next to him there was a pawn holding a staff, and the staff made a sound and said: The forked hand is standing upright. Fei Zhen screamed and forked his hands, and said: I have tried to unify the 100,000 troops, and today I know the preciousness of its prison officials.
- "Compilation of the Three Dynasties Northern League"
Wan Qianbi interrogated Yue Fei, and the jailer next to him beat him and rebuked him, yue Fei obeyed the order in horror, feared the prestige, and General Yue killed the Jin army and rushed out, the hero I, leading 100,000 troops, and now he was reprimanded by the district jailers.
But the prison torments people not only with heavy chains and hunger, but also by the extremely harsh environment.
You might think of ancient cells as the same as detention centers today:
At home, a person is very bored, there are no friends to play, no girlfriend to play, but into the detention center are all talented, talking and listening, super like the feeling inside.
In ancient times, there was a word called "death by heartache", which means "prisoners died of hunger and cold in prison, and later also referred to death from illness in prison." ”
In fact, the environment of ancient prisons was particularly harsh, and a room often held many prisoners. Their eating, drinking, and sleeping will be settled here. It can be said that it is filthy, there are many insects, ants, mosquitoes and lice, and it is easy to get sick in this environment, so many prisoners will get sick and die in prison.
In the last years of Daoguang, Zhang Jixin served as an envoy to Sichuan, and according to his self-written annals, at that time, in Sichuan Province, there were no less than one or two thousand people dying in the classroom every year, which was far higher than the number of death row prisoners every year.
During the More Than 10 years that Pu Wenxian served in the Punishment Department in the Qing Dynasty, he wrote the "Trivia of Ti Prison" based on what he saw and heard, which was enshrined as a law at that time.
In the middle of summer and early autumn, there will be "fleas that devour people to the coolest, fleas follow them, and they will not end up with their bodies, blood stains, four walls like paintings, and the first distress in prison." "Ticks are bed bugs, good at sucking the blood of people and animals, and with fleas crawling all over the body, they have achieved the trio of suffering in ancient prisons."
Bug bites are not a big deal, but being bitten all the time can be painful. The prisoner had already produced sore skin, scratched and scratched to the point of blood, and the wall was like a painting made of black blood. It wasn't a painting, it was blood left behind by the prisoner rubbing the wall. Mosquitoes are too poisonous, and the itching is unbearable, you have to rub your skin bloody to feel better.
In ancient times, the living conditions of the poor were harsh, and lice were common. Ah Q was disappointed to see that the lice on his body were not as good as Wang Hu's. They were still lice found on their clothes "in the daylight at the base of the wall", not to mention how many bugs there would be in the dark and damp prison.
"Xia Ze people are full of filth, and the disease is fumigated. In winter, the skin is severely cold, the skin is broken, the frost is forced, and the death is one after another. "That's the most common thing in prison.
In the past in Zhejiang Province, the prisoners in Jianren and Qian'er Counties reported the dead one after another, and at first they thought that the criminals were also, and if they were carefully informed, they were all from the foreign government, counting no less than three or four hundred people who died at the age of one year, and to Anhui Province, every time they passed through the Huaining County Bureau, they would see a cross-body to be examined, or two or three, about the same as Zhejiang. After passing directly under Baoding, the prison was particularly cumbersome, and five or six hundred people were killed at the age of 500, and pushed to other provinces, more or less. - Inspector Li Peijing of Guizhou, "Li Wensu's Testament and Discussion"
If you think about it, the testimony of a person who has not even committed any related crime is so miserable, how good can you be as a prisoner?
Therefore, the prison guard who manages the prison does not care about the life and death of the prisoner in prison, only the prisoner desperately bribes, can be a little bit human, and the person who has no money to bribe will only die more than the starvation outside the wall.
As for the imperial court's prison meals mentioned at the beginning, this jailer also had to withhold.
According to the Qing Dynasty scholar Liu Heng, during his long-term detention, the parties concerned had to suffer from all kinds of squeezing by the officials: "If the diet is not given at the right time, Hou Qiyu is thirsty and pleading, and his price is tens of times higher, and even a hundred dollars are not allowed to have a meal, and dozens of dollars are not allowed to drink a cup of water... If a relative brings food, he will secretly instigate him to be detained. The bandits ran out of food, and the good people were not allowed to swallow a single grain. Within three or five days, if you arbitrarily ask for tens of thousands of texts, and if you do not fulfill your wishes, you will suffer all kinds of troubles. ”
If you don't give food on time, when you are too hungry to be thirsty, you will sell the food to you at a high price; relatives who want to send food cannot deliver it to you, and they are divided up by the prison guards when they come in and change hands. You have no way but to give money.
You are a poor person who can't survive, you don't have a family to pay you money, and the jailer is angry in his heart, don't abuse who you abuse?
In contrast, rebellion can live a few more days. In the Taiping years, it is more realistic to choose to be a beggar with leprosy and lice.
Pingbai ran to the prison to find death, you say this is not idle?