Russia needs to incarcerate fewer of its citizens, and this is something acknowledged by the Kremlin and Justice Ministry on down. In March, Justice Minister Konovalov admitted that “people ending up in prison is not the answer” to crime. After all, prisons are expensive and unless run and resourced well – and frankly, Russia’s generally are neither – tend to do little to prevent recidivism, instead creating a marginalized, traumatized underclass that has only learnt how to do crime better. (It is no accident that one Russian prison slang term for prison is akademiya.) In Russia’s case they are also incubators for HIV and drug-resistant TB, which are then released into mainstream society with ex-prisoners. They are also incubators for violence, between inmates and by guards and suicides: in 2009, for example, 4150 prisoners died in Russia’s prisons from various causes, about 0.5% of the total (almost exactly double the USA’s figure, based on deaths in state prisons 2001-7).

In fairness, work has been done to address some of these issues. For much of the 1990s, the prison system received no more than 60% of the resources it needed just to survive, and while estimates vary, the figure is now closer to 90%, with some areas actually receiving enough of an excess to manage to build more modern facilities or upgrade existing ones. New medical treatment regimes have at least begun to slow the spread of TB according to the WHO. The culture of impunity for prison guards involved in extralegal violence has also been restricted, although while there have been prosecutions (especially if you beat a former FSB officer to death), there is still a long way to go. After all, given the overstretch facing the GUIN (Glavnoe upravlenie ispolneniya nakazaniya, Main Directorate of Administering Sentencing, but in effect Main Directorate of Corrections), prison officers often feel exposed and vulnerable, and resort to violence in part to assert their authority, a morally-reprehensible but frankly inevitable consequence. The same is true of the way that in some prisons, gangs of convicts are effectively handed de facto control of parts of prisons who then use violence and intimidation to maintain a form of order. Sometimes known as SPDs (Discipline and Enforcement Sections), this practice was formally banned at the end of 2009, but still persists in many cases. That even GUFSIN (the Federal Penitentiary Control Directorate) officers are now also sometimes being held to account, though, does suggest that change is on the way.

(more…)