To defer the moment of punishment, as I have mentioned before, convicts sometimes resorted to terrible expedients: by stabbing one of the officials or a fellow convict they would get a new trial, and their punishment would be deferred for some two months and their aim would be attained. It was nothing to them that the punishment when it did come, two months later, would be twice or three times as severe; all they care about was deferring the awful moment if only for a few days at any cost⁠—so extreme is sometimes the prostration of spirit of these poor creatures.