Forty Days at Kamas

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Book: Read Forty Days at Kamas for Free Online
Authors: Preston Fleming
criminals like Renaud, Grady, and Mills. These men had agreed to serve out their sentences as warders in a labor camp rather than as prisoners in conventional lock–ups in exchange for being given two years credit for every year served. I knew that the presence of violent career criminals at Kamas was a matter of vital concern to Roesemann. The felons had not given him a moment of peace in the holding prisons.
    Jerry Lee asked about work categories at Kamas. Mines were universally feared because of their reputation as death traps. Logging camps and quarries did not rank much higher. Federal safety regulations were not enforced at any of the worksites in the camp system. Bernstein told us that he had spent six months at a gold placer facility in the Yukon where conditions were as primitive as the days of the original Yukon gold rush a century before. Prisoners perished daily from exposure, disease, and exhaustion.
    Fortunately, Kamas offered a variety of work specialties, including military and civilian recycling, road–building, logging, snow–clearing, and silver mining. Recycling, however, employed by far the largest number of prisoners. The military recycling site, located on the road to Heber, salvaged destroyed or damaged military ordnance left over from Civil War II and the invasion of Mexico. With so much weaponry and equipment having been lost in Russia, and industrial capacity stalled at less than half of what it had been before the Events, recycling was essential to rearming the military.
    The civilian recycling site, located near the burned–out village of Oakley along the Weber River, specialized in truck and auto parts as well as building materials and fixtures removed from forfeited properties around Park City. According to Bernstein, camp engineers estimated that it would take more than a decade before the Kamas–based salvage crews could exhaust the potential of the former Park City and Deer Valley resort areas, once rebel strongholds. The high price of auto parts and plumbing and electrical fixtures on the black market meant that the government would make a fortune from stripping the confiscated properties of its once–prosperous citizens.
    Jerry Lee followed up with a question about work quotas and food rations and the margin for survival between them. Was it possible to outlive your sentence if you stayed on full rations? Or was the system rigged from the outset against a prisoner's survival?
    Bernstein answered that Kamas was not as corrupt as other labor camps, where guards and warders grew fat on extra rations stolen from starving prisoners. Still, quotas and rations were calculated at Kamas with precious little margin for error. For that reason, prisoners were always seeking easier work or additional food by fair means or foul. The constant struggle for survival led to rampant theft, cheating, fighting, extortion, and every other means of ensuring one’s own survival at the expense of the next man.
    After nearly four years in the camps, Bernstein's theory was that State Security considered political prisoners fundamentally incapable of rehabilitation or re–entry into Unionist society. But if so many prisoners were to remain in custody indefinitely, the camps had to be self–financing. And since a prisoner's value to the state depended on his contribution to the camp’s output, his continued receipt of rations depended upon his meeting the work quota. Anyone who failed to meet the quota saw his rations cut. The problem for us was that anything less than a full ration was insufficient to sustain life.
    When asked how camp veterans managed to beat these odds, Bernstein replied simply that they were willing to do whatever it took to survive. New prisoners, he said, tended to harbor unrealistic hopes of a last–minute reprieve or clung to delusions that they were special and would somehow be looked after. They tended to judge the camp by their pre–arrest values and standards. Veteran prisoners

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