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The law called for humane imprisonment under conditions aiming to re-educate the condemned man rather than to confirm him in resentment and crime, and this humane code was often carried out in the case of ordinary offenders; but the practice with regard to the hundreds of thousands arrested for political heresy and obstruction was to send them to Siberia into camps more miserable than those settlements which had so loosely confined the revolutionaries under the Tsars. The penalties -- which were at first moderate, rejected capital punishment, and decreed only ten years of imprisonment for murder -- became more and more severe, until capital punishment was decreed for clipping silver coins, hording silver, smuggling currency, offering rubles at more than the legal rate, theft from a collective farm, repeated negligence resulting in injury to costly machinery, embezzlement of public money, and any offense which in the judgment of the secret police made the offender more valuable dead than alive. ` Page 134