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AT WHAT COST DOES THE REST OF THE WORLD IGNORE THE GROWING EPIDEMIC OF MULTI-DRUG RESISTANT TB IN RUSSIAN PRISONS?
 ergei is tall and thin, with black horn-rim glasses that give him more the look of an owlish accountant than a felon. His fellow prisoners and their guards are silent as he recounts his story. The only other sound aside from his soft voice is that of coughing: like him, all the other young convicts who crowd the cell are sick. At times, Sergei seems bored with the tale; at times, intimidated by the hush. He punctuates his sentences with a rattling cough, raising, as an afterthought, a long pale hand to his mouth.
A prisoner takes his pills under "directly observed" therapy.
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Shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sergei explains, he became involved in a complicated scam—something to do with fake checks. Arrested in the Siberian city of Kemerovo, he was held in pretrial detention for more than a year. The jail was dank and crammed with others awaiting trial. Food and sanitary conditions were wretched, and soon Sergei began to cough and lose weight. After his trial, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis (see "The Fall and Rise of Tuberculosis) and transferred to a so-called TB colony, a prison facility dedicated to the detention and care of convicts ill with tuberculosis. Since Colony 33, in the nearby town of Mariinsk—notorious for its especially grim conditions—was already overflowing, Sergei was sent instead to a colony at Vladimir, about sixty miles east of Moscow. That was almost eight years ago.
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