a question about Dostoevsky and prisons

[Hugh Olmsted]

Sasha, Bob, et al., 
Playing around with back-translation into Russian of Bob's English quote, it is easy in Google.ru to find the following Russian text widely attributed to Dostoevsky: "Если общество хочет проверить уровень своей цивилизации, пусть заглянет в тюрьму".  But nowhere that I've seen is the attribution spelled out – no specific work of Dostoevsky's ever seems to be mentioned, let alone any more specific locus.
I've gone through all the other works of Dostoevsky as listed in the Lib.Ru/Klassika (URL http://az.lib.ru/d/dostoewskij_f_m/), searching for significant parts of this text, to no avail.  A more intense search there of Записки из мервого дома – trying out variant grammatical forms, close synonyms, and the like – also comes up with zilch.
Maybe it IS a misattribution, or maybe it springs from a different authorial version/edition of Записки than what is standardly available ??  At any rate, in case it may spare somebody the work of repeating these steps, here is the report on what I've tried.
Best,
Hugh Olmsted


On Dec 15, 2012, at 8:32 PM, Robert A. Rothstein wrote:

> On 12/15/2012 11:38 AM, Sasha Spektor wrote:
>> 
>> The phrase "По состоянию тюрем можно судить о состоянии общества" has been attributed to Dostoevsky and said to be from "Записки из Мертвого Дома."  It's not there, at least neither I nor my word search can find it.  Did he say it somewhere else?  Is it an apocryphal attribution?  I would really appreciate your collective wisdom in this case.  
>> 
> The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro, quotes "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons" from Constance Garnett's translation of The House of the Dead.
> 
> Bob Rothstein
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