Russia’s Prison Meltdown

BY KEVIN KRAJICK

Moscow - Valery Abramkin, a former nuclear scientist, was strolling down a dim corridor in Moscow's 230-year-old Butyrka jail. Behind a row of solid black steel doors to the left, unseen prisoners were locked in communal cells. Through windows to the right, down in the cramped inner courtyard, sat the ruins of a Russian Orthodox church. "It's like visiting the house where you used to live," he remarked. "You know which way to turn."

Butyrka holds those awaiting trial, and 20 years ago Abramkin waited here on charges of "slanderous fabrications to discredit the Soviet system"—that is, writing dissident newspaper articles. He was shuttled between dark solitary cells, the "fools" corridor" for the insane, and death row, where at 4 p.m. on some days he could hear neighbors being taken out to be shot. After nearly 12 months, his guilty verdict and transfer for five years to a Siberian labor camp "was the happiest day of my life," Abramkin says; in Siberia, the treatment, food and camaraderie were a lot better. Now free to express whatever he wants, he works as head of the Moscow Center for Prison Reform (M.C.P.R.). That's a demanding full-time job. In the new Russia, many prisoners are worse off than in the old.

While still in exile, he founded an inmates' rights organization, Prison and Liberty, which evolved into the Moscow Center for Prison Reform. Its stated goal: to promote reform of the Russian criminal justice system in accordance with international standards of treatment of prisoners. It does this by lobbying government officials and members of the Duma, the Russian Parliament, for better laws, regulations and conditions;

working with GUIN; informing inmates about their legal rights and educating the public about criminal justice issues.

One early accomplishment was the creation in 1992 of the weekly 25-minute radio show "Oblaka" ("Clouds"), broadcast on Radio of Russia. Abramkin is its chief writer. The program educates listeners about the criminal code and corrections regulations, provides news about legislation affecting prisoners and answers letters. (The producers, who regularly visit institutions, receive about 400 letters a month.) M.C.P.R. has also put out about two dozen booklets including Abramkin's free book of tips for prisoners, "How to Survive in a Soviet Prison" (1992) and "In Search of A Solution" (1996), a full discussion of the Russian prison problem. Operating with a full-time staff of 12 as well as volunteers, M.C.P.R. also provides inmates with direct legal aid and holds evening classes on basic legal rights.

Currently, M.C.P.R. is presenting an exhibit called "Man and Prison" in major cities and many provinces. This consists of large panels of graphic prison photos with text, quotes from inmates and paintings and handicrafts by prisoners. It is a powerful work. One photo, taken by inmates and smuggled out, shows a crowded cell reminiscent of a concentration camp barrack. "It has the stench of a slaughterhouse. .. .It can get so airless, it is hard to strike a match," says a caption. Next to the photo is the classic diagram of the hold of a slave ship, with rows of humans crammed in chains together and a comparison of the available space—about the same. A section on ТВ has striking color photos of emaciated men apparently dying of the disease. The traveling exhibit is accompanied by press conferences, seminars organized with the help of local human rights groups and meetings with local lawyers and officials. A version has traveled as far as Paris bookstores, and M.C.P.R. recently put one on the ground floor of the Duma as crime-related legislation was being considered. (Abramkin says that the brochure most taken by Duma members was "How to Appeal Your Sentence").

Because of its high visibility, M.C.P.R. has developed a national and international reputation. Abramkin is used to hosting journalists and other visitors and is often quoted by the foreign news media. Duma committees working out 1992 alterations to the Penal Code and investigating police violations of human rights sought his advice, and he has served as a member of the Presidential Council for Judicial Reform and deputy chair of the Human Rights Commission at the Presidential Public Chamber.

On a recent morning, he addressed about 150 14- and 15-year-olds in the gym/auditorium of Moscow's Public School 230, where the M.C.P.R. exhibit had been up all week. Abramkin ran through the statistics—the high per capita imprisonment rate, increasing overcrowding, the number of juveniles locked up. "Everybody is a criminal at one time or another," he told the students, "even if it is just stealing a lightbulb. So what is crime? Any of you could wind up being imprisoned."

He described the horrible conditions, especially in urban jails, and argued, "When you lock a person away, you don't get rid of crime; you introduce it. It is difficult to live as a normal person after that".

He then launched into the problem. Because the prisons are the center of the epidemic, "the whole world is afraid of us now. It brings danger not only for us but all of humanity." Fortunately, he said, "that rings an alarm bell, because high authorities are also anxious about it. So M.C.P.R. and the Ministry of Justice are trying not only to bring about a reform in the prisons, but to ask the question: Is it necessary to lock so many people up? Ask yourselves: Would you like to have ТВ—or be just a little more tolerant of small crimes?"

He concluded with a discussion of prison slang. A mirror is called a "monkey," he said, for the caged thing you see in it. A "tik" is an imaginary button to call the guard for service. The word for TV translates as "the food box." Fish soup is called margalovka—the winking one—for all the heads looking up at you from the bowl. "Why do people think up these words?" he asked. "To make life more interesting, and to settle in. You know you're going to be there for a while."

Afterward, in private, Abramkin talked about his work, and the prognosis—which he does not consider hopeless, despite the horror stories. When Gorbachev came into power, he points out, the prison population was halved. "That was the era when ex-communists were striving to show how liberal they were. I suddenly had the possibility to do many things." After 1991 the economy plunged, and authoritarian forces partially reasserted themselves. "Things became very difficult," he says, "but from 1998 they have improved again." In that year the civilian Ministry of Justice took over GUIN from the semimilitary Ministry of the Interior. Because Justice officials are civilian, "when someone there wants to do something good, they're not afraid of the hierarchy," Abramkin said. "And these days the Justice Ministry is headed by reformers, mainly. Since 1998 they've accepted a lot of our concepts, and sometimes we even work together on legislation. They really accept our suggestions and sometimes ask for help in lobbying the Duma. So we have the possibility for progress again."

He emphasizes that he aims for concrete results—"not just theories." A March 2001 law making it harder to hold for long periods people charged with petty offenses was written by GUIN with his and other reformers' support. GUIN rules regarding phone calls and packages have also eased. "One can't say it is completely cloudless; there are places with bad food, bad health, not even soap—just bleach. But GUIN tries." He claims public attitudes are softening and the mass media are paying more attention, but "we have to make a constant noise," he says.

The next task, he adds, is to get to those above GUIN—the top officials—because the Ministry of Justice is outranked, and thus still constrained by Interior and the prosecutors. "When the top men say to do something, the underlings do it. At least now we have an acknowledgment from the top," he says, referring to President Putin.

Abramkin believes the first aim must be simple reduction of the incarcerated population; he considers a one-fifth cut a realistic goal. "Then we can gradually establish alternatives to prisons and help for ex-convicts. The main thing is to deal not just with prisons, but with the whole system. Since we lack financial means, we have to be clear about the priorities. Otherwise, everything will go into the sand."

Russian prisons are no longer just Russia's problem. They are spreading multidrug-resistant strains of tuberculosis that threaten the world. With Russia's plunging economy, ТВ cases in the general population have tripled since 1990 to about one per thousand persons—15 times the rate in the United States. The epicenter is the prison system; there, a full 10 percent of inmates have active cases. Perhaps half of those, coming from the lower rungs of society, contracted the disease before being locked up. But since airborne ТВ bacteria spread mainly in tight quarters among poorly nourished people, nearly all may acquire the latent germ before they leave, says Alexander Goldfarb, a Russian microbiologist at the New York-based Public Health Research Institute (P.H.R.I.).

With more than 100,000 prisoners released each year, drug-resistant strains are spreading. They have been found in Russian emigres in Germany and Israel; this March P.H.R.I. announced that one identified from a prison in Tomsk, Siberia, had emerged in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, N.Y. "Ifs getting worse," says Goldfarb, who estimates it will take a billion dollars and a decade for the epidemic to be slowed. "The prisons are becoming a sort of medical Chemobyl."—K.K.

The Ford Foundation began funding projects in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in 1989 and in 1996 opened a Moscow office, which has funded a wide variety of criminal-justice-related projects in Russia.

The Moscow Center for Prison Reform (M.C.P.R.) was one of the first to receive funding; the group received support for its work with the government and the public to reduce numbers in pretrial detention or those sentenced to incarceration. A major collaborator is the Moscow office of Penal Reform International (P.R.I.), which mounts a small-grants program with Ford Foundation support. In 2000 P.R.I.-Moscow awarded 16 grants; the grantees included:

• Information, Consultation, Cooperation, a Moscow NGO that helps inmates and prison staff file appeals for pardons and provides clerical help to the overburdened official Presidential Pardoning Commission.

• Pretrial detention center IZ 64/1 in Smolensk, to hire part-time teachers and buy educational materials for juvenile inmates.

• The law faculty of Tomsk State University, to provide student legal aid clinics in places of detention.

• Novorossisk NGO, School of Peace, to promote restorative justice, which emphasizes reconciliation and rehabilitation as an alternative to prison sentences.

• The Rehabilitation Center, Help, in Krasnodar to cooperate on rehabilitation strategies with the NGO Convict.

Ford is also lending support to INDEM, a Moscow think-tank, to set up a new criminal justice policy center in partnership with the New York-based Vera Institute of Justice. Projects include developing strategies to alter police treatment of suspects and undertaking an evaluation of a major project in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia's third-largest city, to speed processing of pretrial detainees.