What’s the best way to rehabilitate juvenile defenders? a. boot camp, b. flogging, c. psychotropic drugs, or d. none of the above?

Workers at a Russian juvenile penal colony (their term, likely borrowed from Kafka) surmise that the answer is d. none of the above — and a dose of Dostoyevsky. Yes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

In the next couple of weeks, young men in the juvenile penal colony will be performing scenes from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead.

Charged for offenses ranging from petty theft to rape and murder, the 20 youths involved in this experiment with literary therapy range from ages 14 to 19. Prior to testing their hand at acting out scenes from Dostoyevsky’s novel, none of them had read any of the Russian scholar’s work. In fact, many were illiterate.

Yet, by pushing a group of young men who are ambivalent about literature, theater and, in many instances, their own lives, director Yevgeny Zimin seeks to reinvigorate troubled youth by enabling them to  act out roles with which they closely can identify. In the process, he hopes, they can regain a sense of their own humanity.

Certain scenes involving violence and alcoholism were edited out of the show, however, in order to prevent the youth from acting out roles that might send them back down the road to crime.

Can literary therapy empower those whom the education system seems to have failed, or does this sort of performance art risk making a spectacle of the lives and acting skills of the young men on the stage? Only time will tell, seeing as these youth haven’t performed before an audience or been set free from the penal colony yet.

But the rule of law seems to be failing in Russia like there’s no tomorrow, so it cannot hurt to try this innovative solution. And given that those in U.S. prisons tend to be treated like animals — regardless of their age — perhaps the U.S. should follow suit.

After all, if crime is punishable because it is considered a violation of others’ humanity (or property), then retributive justice’s attempt to restore humanity by denying humanity seems doomed to fail at achieving its intended goal. Finding a better solution, as the Russians have discovered, demands spicing things up. And as my English teachers taught me, Dostoyevsky tends to do just that.

Laura Nathan-Garner