Seven years in one of Russia's most notorious prisons is a serious sentence, well-worthy of the time-tested genre of prison memoirs. All the more so because Alexei Gavrish spent those years in St. Petersburg's Kresty pretrial detention center not as a prisoner, but first as a psychiatrist, and then as the head of the largest psychiatric department in the penal system of the entire northwest of the country. From this rather exotic perspective, he very frankly talks about how Russian prisons and prison medicine are organized: who works there and for what purpose; who sits there and how; who treats and according to what principles; who is being treated and for what. Malingerers and detectives, drug addicts and schizophrenics, orderlies and pedophiles: what is literally going on in the heads of all these people united by a very strange and complex common place of residence - starting with the author, who by the end reveals himself to be a monster and decides to leave the criminal system.