Arcadia Foundation

Russian prisons have long resembled ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch’ – a mysterious, inhumane series of cramped cells, devoid of retribution and rehabilitation, filled only with danger and despair. Wrongfully accused, of which there are many both notables and unknowns, line the dorms, and many pass away from starvation, hypothermia or disease. The inmates are divided into barracks housing a hundred or so men without regard to the severity of their crimes. At night, a guard locks the door and walks away, leaving first-time offenders and people convicted of nonviolent crimes to fend for themselves in a crowd of gang members, hit men and other career criminals.

Beginning this year, however, the New York Times has reported that first-time offenders may no longer have to live in fear. In the first major effort to upgrade a prison system that has changed little since Stalin established it more than 70 years ago, career criminals will be separated from the general prison population and housed in new prisons with cellblocks, rather than barracks.

President Dmitri Medvedev is pushing the measure to first break up the culture of barracks life and then to do away with common inmate housing almost entirely.

Continued, as excerpted from the New York Times:

Common barracks are unusual outside the former Soviet Union and parts of Africa, according to a London-based advocacy group, Penal Reform International. Western European and American correctional institutions typically rely on large cellblocks, with a few inmates to a cell.

Yet the vast majority of Russian prisoners — 724,000 out of a total prison population of 862,000 — still live in freestanding barracks, rough-hewn, low-slung buildings of wood or brick encircled by barbed wire, usually in a remote place. Low-cost and high-volume, they are modest upgrades of the camps of the 1930s to 1950s and hold the second largest per capita inmate population in the world, trailing only the United States.

The overhaul calls for a three-stage unwinding of the barracks housing system and the abolition of all 755 penal colonies, what remains of Stalin’s gulag, by 2020.

Under the plan, some sites will be renamed “settlement colonies,” a sort of minimum security prison. Hardened prisoners will be moved to cellblocks, though only just over 2,700 inmates live in cells in Russia today.

In the first stage, recidivists will be put in separate colonies apart from the general prison population. So far, officials have relocated 64,000 of 149,000 prisoners scheduled for transfer.

By 2016, prison officials say, they intend to separate the most violent first-time offenders from petty criminals, and by 2020 move them and the recidivists into new prisons with cellblocks. After that, the category of “correctional colony” would cease to exist in the Russian penal system.

Human rights groups praised the new approach, but given Russia’s recent track record on rights, they said they doubted whether it would be fully carried out. “Russian prisons are widely acknowledged to be troubled institutions with poor conditions, torture and ill treatment,” said Allison Gill, director of Human Rights Watch in Russia.

The effort represents a departure from a long tradition of Russian corrections philosophy. Correctional officers had openly — and legally until this January — used the coarse social groupings that arose in the barracks to help run the colonies.

Until the changes, all groups lived packed in the same barracks. And though rights groups say murders are common, the Russian prison service provides no data on violent death.

The overall mortality rate of 464 deaths from all causes per 100,000 inmates in Russian prison colonies, though, is well above the 251 deaths per 100,000 inmates in state prisons in the United States, the institutions where the vast majority of American convicts do time.

Aleksandr N. Khramov, a lanky 22-year-old convicted murderer, wore the red armband of an activist as he kept watch in a barracks corridor. Mr. Khramov said he chose to become an activist while still on the train to the colony, after a fellow inmate advised him that it was the best tactic for survival or early release.

The ranks of the activists were greatly increased over the past decade under a strategy to regain control of the barracks from gangs headed by the so-called authorities, said Valery V. Borshov, a former member of Parliament who oversaw a committee on prison reform. Reinforcing the Discipline and Order Squads, he said, harked back to the Soviet-era technique for barracks management.

“It was reminiscent of the kapo in the fascist camps,” Mr. Borshov said of empowering some prisoners to act as guards. The activists would do things like beat confessions out of prisoners, an activity that was tantamount, he said, to outsourcing abuses of human rights. “It’s a very dangerous system, and it was only abolished in Russia this year.”

Aleksei V. Chudin, the deputy warden at Mr. Khramov’s colony, and a lifelong guard in the gulag, said he saw the wisdom in the new policy to limit barracks violence. But he said the hierarchies created by male criminals in prison would never go away.

Breaking up barracks of a hundred inmates into cells with four men, he said, will just create more of them.

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