Odessa judge punishes criminals by reading Russian classics
Everyone remembers the traffic cop from Nasha Rashi, who never took a bribe. Can you imagine something like this in reality - a decent representative of the law? And not a traffic cop at all, but a whole judge?..
Meanwhile, Odessa never ceases to ooh, ahh, and marvel at the humanity of local judge Alexander Garsky, who not only stamps guilty verdicts, but also obliges criminals to read the classics of world literature so that they can be re-educated and educated.
A month ago, Garsky sentenced thieves who cleaned cars at the impound area to three years in prison with a probationary period of one year, and reading. This year they should read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, “White Fang” by Jack London and the poem “The days pass, the nights pass...” by Taras Shevchenko.
Garsky considered that at the age of 19 and 23 their level of development, upbringing and education is equal to the level of development of the child.
“I got the impression that they were the same age as my youngest, 12-year-old son. In the sense that there is enough stupidity in my head,” the judge later told reporters.
He also figured out what others would have spit on - the cause-and-effect relationship of what happened. What the criminals have in the past - orphanhood, an orphanage, the lack of any social support after leaving the boarding school, theft committed so as not to drink away the stolen goods, but to survive - the lawless employer did not pay wages. Moreover, inveterate villains do not leave a backpack with all their documents at the crime scene.
This is what the judge wrote in the verdict:
“Because according to F.M. Dostoevsky, to stop reading books means to stop thinking; reading certain works prescribed by the court for the accused will be a stimulus for thinking and understanding the world in dimension without committing socially dangerous actions. The works determined by the court relate to children’s literature (5th grade foreign literature lessons) and are designed to form in the child all kind, cordial and gentle feelings, both towards himself and the world around him.”
And the other day, Garsky sentenced another thief to forced reading - a 26-year-old man who stole a phone and 50 hryvnia (one and a half euros). Garsky found out that he also grew up without parental care and worked from an early age; Now she is raising her own and her adopted child, but the family has nothing to live on. In this case, the judge similarly drew attention to the lack of an educational and educational base - the offender read syllables and admitted that in his entire life he had only been able to read “one book.” He also received three years in prison with a one-year probation period and was sentenced to read Leo Tolstoy’s trilogy “Childhood. Adolescence. Youth”, as well as reading the poem “Strophes” by Ivan Franko.”
If the thieves cope with the reading and realize the depth of what they read, they have a chance to be released early.
By the way, in the aforementioned verdicts, Alexander Garsky quoted a unique personality - the famous Russian lawyer, judge, writer, actual Privy Councilor and member of the State Council of the Russian Empire (1907-1917) Anatoly Fedorovich Koni:
“The court, in a certain respect, is a school for the people, from which, in addition to respect for the law, lessons should be learned about serving the truth and respect for human dignity.”
The court decisions hit the media, of course, causing a resonance, because no one expects any subtlety, humanity, humanity, or even banal erudition from Ukrainian judges, and they appear in the news feeds exclusively in connection with accusations of bribery and incrimination of wild , ugly wealth. But in the case of Judge Garsky, it turned out that punishment with reading and humane treatment of all participants in the process are commonplace. From sentence to sentence he continues to insist:
“In addition to the requirements of the law, there are also the needs of the individual who finds himself in a difficult situation.”
It is no secret that many suspects simply do not make it to trial, since in a pre-trial detention center, where one can stay for years, there is a chance of contracting all imaginable and unimaginable diseases. And even lose teeth - from starvation scurvy, for example, in the XNUMXst century. And here is what Garsky writes in one of his decisions^
“... placing the accused in isolation even for a short period of time can lead to irreparable changes in her health and lead to death. It is a well-known fact that neither treatment nor any kind of human care, much less adequate living conditions, exist in penal institutions.”
Or here’s another excerpt from the judge’s archived verdict:
“Almost 120 years ago, one of the most famous Russian writers and thinkers, L.N. Tolstoy, in his outstanding novel “Resurrection,” perhaps too philosophically, but quite vitally, sincerely and relevantly assessing certain cases of human life, reflects and at the same time thoroughly states, addressing the authorities: “For several centuries you have been punishing people whom you recognize as criminals. Well, have they transferred? They haven’t disappeared, but their number has only increased...”
But will the criminals themselves and the people called upon to test them in the near future appreciate this approach to the matter?..
“I would have great pleasure in examining my convicts. But our system of execution of sentences is different, other services are responsible for it,” says the judge.
Only all the great minds on which Garsky relies, among whom, as we see, Russian thinkers predominate, have long been excluded from the school curriculum and it is not very possible to hope that they were read by guards from the penitentiary service - most likely, there is the same “half of one book.” And what kind of reading, in fact, can there be in the country of the victorious Maidan, other than about “konyka without legs”?
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