Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 24 – Moscow has taken
great pride in the fact that the number of Russians incarcerated in its penal
system has fallen in recent years, but it has not stressed two current
shortcomings of the system: the number of prisoners per 100,000 (434) remains vastly
higher than most countries and the number of recidivists has doubled over the
last decade.
Nor have regime media outlets
pointed out that current proposals for reform instead of making things better
will lead to a situation in which Russia’s prisons “will very much resemble a
renwed variant of the GULAG,” according to Aleksey Kozlov and Olga Romanova of Novaya gazeta (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2017/05/24/72542-strana-otmotala-sto-let-lagerey).
They offer that conclusion at the
end of a long article today which begins by quotimg Aleksand Auzan, the dean of
the economics faculty at Moscow State University who says that present-day
Russian society “educates the individual in three institutions: the school, the
army and the jail.”
The first two are important, but the
third is far more significant than many think.
If one counts not only the number of Russians who have passed through
the prison system but also their families, friends, police, court officials and
jailors, “almost half of the population of Russia is one way or another
connected to prison,” Kozlov and Romanova say.
“And what is the prison teaching
them at present? It is teaching them to
lie and to conform. To give bribes to get out early … to avoid contradicting
the authorities and to avoid showing any initiative and to be a cog in the
system.” And it is also teaching those
who go through it to have contempt for the rules and the rulers.
“More than that,” they continue, “besides
faith in the state and in other people, prison also takes away from the individual
his future, that which he could have after being freed.” And it does nothing to
help him in that direction while incarcerated, having failed to provide prisoners
with any useful training or habits for life outside the walls.
Prison officials say that what they
do in the camps is because there is no other way to establish order. “But this
isn’t the case,” the journalists say. What is needed for order is a complex
system of infrastructure and rules that promote different outcomes than the
ones being promoted at present.
Most of the prisons and colonies in
Russia are antiquated: according to the penal system itself, 80 percen tof them
need “immediate reconstruction.”
Fifty-two of them don’t have plumbing, most are horrifically overcrowded,
and few correspond even to Russian let alone European standards of hygiene.’
Those who work are paid so little
that they have to turn to criminal authorities within the jails for the most
basic needs. But that pattern means that they are quickly recruited into the
ranks of those who commit more serious and violent crimes. There was some progress against this practice
in 2011 when first timers and recidivists were separated. But little else.
A great deal of additional money is
needed to address all these problems, but more important, the two journalists
say, but more important are fundamental structural reforms. Those are not being proposed by the penal
administration. Instead, all of its proposals suggest that they will end by
creating “a renewed version of [Stalin’s] GULAG.”
Under the proposed changes, prisoners
will lose control over where they are sent – often distant from their families –
what they are employed to work on and how much they will receive. Moreover, the already inadequate medical care
the prisoners now receive will become even worse.
And such an arrangement just as it
did earlier will cast a dark shadow on Russia’s future, quite possibly making
it impossible for Russia to reform and at the very least placing burdens on it
that will add to the difficulties its citizens now must bear.
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