Valery Abramkin.
I would like to begin with an episode which doesn't seem to deal with
the subject of today's hearings. The Society for the Protection of Convicted Businessmen (
cм. no?aieoa NGO’s) has lately approached the Prosecutor's office of the Nizhny
Novgorod region with a request to verify information about mass deathsin one of the
regional colonies. The Nizhny Novgorod Prosecutor's Office in its reply reports:
"Nine prisoners died during nine months of 1994 and nineteen prisoners during nine
months of 1995. Almost all of these prisoners arrived from Moscow pre-trial detention
centers in very poor condition, they suffered from acute tuberculosis and died within
several days after their arrival to the colony because we don't have medicines in the
colony. There was nothing to treat them with".
Next abstract begins with the following words: "The territory of
the colony is well-equipped, the dormitories are clean and ordered, the fountain works,
the prisoners are supplied with fresh water and soap".
What is going on in the law-making field is rather like making the
fountain work while people are dying around it. We face a horrible reality: our
penitentiary institutions are turning into death camps. Conditions in some prisons are
worse than those in the Stalin period, but we are preoccupied with the
"fountain."
Since 1992 it has become evident that the post-Soviet criminal justice
system is too expensive for the federal budget in the context of a market economy. Last
year prisoners were supplied with only 20% of the medicine they required.
There are not enough resources to disinfect sewage in colonies for
TB-infected prisoners. I know a concrete case when a prison doctor lost consciousness out
of hunger during an operation. Prison staff of SIZOs and
colonies go five or six months without receiving their salaries. There is not enough money
even for uniforms. There are recorded cases of penitentiary workers committing suicides
because they can't feed their children. Security facilities are falling apart out of a
lack of resources to maintain them. Correctional labor institutions have come to present a
danger to society as a source of epidemics and social tension. Every month more than 3,000
prisoners with acute tuberculosis are released from places of confinement. Now 2% of the
Russian population suffer from TB. As far as I remember, according to international
standards it is considered an epidemic when 1% of the population is struck with a disease.
This is our horrible reality on the background of the working "fountain".
Our compatriots who lived in the period of Stalin’s prison camps
could get away with saying they knew nothing about it.
They received no information, everything was kept in secret. We,
however, are aware of what is going on now.
The penitentiary system has become a hell on earth, a system of
destroying people. Meanwhile, lawmakers are preoccupied with abstract legal problems, for
example, whether criminal executive legislation should include the technology of
implementing punishment, or whether the "moral reformation of prisoners" should
be added as a duty.
People suffocating and dying from hunger need air and bread rather than
program reforms.
The first thing that I propose to do is to stop discussing drafts of
new criminal, criminal-procedural and criminal-executive codes, and begin immediately to
save people dying in our prisons and colonies. When an earthquake takes place, the
reaction of a normal man is evident: to put off everything that was planned and come to
the rescue of people buried under ruins. Unfortunately, "ruins" is not a
metaphor. The walls of many SIZOs are literally ruined,
unable to hold the amount of human flesh, packed inside them. Consequences of the tragedy
in SIZOs are equal to those of the Sakhalin earthquake.
But the prison "earthquake" didn't break out yesterday, it has been going on for
more than three years.
Prison conditions in pre-trial detention centers are torture. This was
acknowledged by UN, CE experts and the Russian Government. Thus, Russia violates Article 3
of the "Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Being Subjected to Torture
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment": "exceptional
circumstances such as a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or
any other public emergency may not be invoked as a justification for torture or other
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment".
The situation is awful not only in SIZOs
(pre-trial detention centers), but in colonies as well. For example, according to the
Nizhny Novgorod Prosecutor's Office 38% of prisoners are underweight.
Thus, lawmaking is disconnected from the real social, political and
economic situation.
The experience I have gained in three years of incessant attempts to
draw the attention of the legislative and executive authorities to the tragedy in SIZOs, leaves me without illusions: I realize that once
again my appeal for humanity will have no response. That is why I will stick to talking
about the economic situation. In 1994—95 direct expenses from the federal budget for
detaining one prisoner were $ 1,000 a year. Total expenses are approximately 2.5—3
times more. I should mention that there are now about one million prisoners in Russia. It
takes $30,000—40,000 to create space for one prisoner. Considering the economic
situation in our country, first of all we should think about a considerable reduction of
the prison population rather than extra resources for the penitentiary system.
This is all the more true since these resources will be taken from
social programs developed to help the homeless, refugees, teenagers etc. — the very
programs which can help to reduce the crime rate. It seems logical to think in the first
place not about what conditions should be provided for a million prisoners, but how to
reduce the prison population to the level of a civilized country. According to experts as
many as 15% of the adult Russian population are ex-prisoners. At present there are almost
700 prisoners per 100,000 of the population in our country. This figure is 7—12 times
lower in west European countries, where the economic situation is much better and the
crime rate is much higher.
oing back to the subject of today's hearings, I have to point out that
the draft under consideration (as well as the drafts of criminal and criminal procedural
codes) lacks a general conception. We know perfectly well how such draft laws are being
worked out. What is offered for consideration at hearings is a mixture of fragments from
radically different documents. As a result we have a "salad" which is worse than
any of the original drafts. They, at least, had a concept and were consistent. The
executive draft of the criminal code in this respect differs from those of criminal and
criminal procedural codes. But its concept, as was already mentioned, is based on
national, that is totalitarian, experience. Old slogans like
"building communism" and "socialist commonwealth"
have been replaced with new ones: "international standards" and "moral
reformation". In practice prisoners are still regarded from the standpoint of
behavioral science, which does not impute any morality to people. This approach reduces
all the diversity of human nature to the reflexes of Pavlov's dog. It is supposed, for
example, that human behavior can be regulated by physical measures, say, by putting a
person in better or worse conditions. Prisoners who committed grave crimes or do not obey
prison administration are put in worse conditions. Roughly speaking, the authors of this
concept suppose that a person planning a serious crime would think twice before being sent
to a prison with skimpier rations.
One of the aims of the executive legislation on crime, according to the
draft under consideration, is to rehabilitate the convict.
I would suggest that this vague notion be replaced with more concrete
tasks: to rehabilitate the personality of the prisoner, for example to change his criminal
precepts, and to minimize harmful consequences of imprisonment. Convicts have difficulty
adapting back to life in the society and family. Their social connections are severed and
they have lost the social skills to recoup. As long as the harmful consequences of
imprisonment are not reduced prison will remain a factory of crime; the more prisoners we
have today, the higher the crime rate our children will face.
So far prisons, even the best of them, are an artificial social world.
When we say that prison conditions should be brought nearer to those in society. We mean
to give them the personal responsibilities of a free person, rather than to put them in
perfect conditions where everything is fine. Such an approximation of international
standards requires a change in traditional (national) approaches to the problem of
punishment rather than resources.
The project under consideration does not comply at all with strategic
directions of modern criminology and the study of penal systems, it deals with the
problems of controlling masses of prisoners and effective manipulating the prisoner's
personality.
The prime criteria for "rehabilitation" are a prisoner's
obedience and his ability to adapt to artificial prison conditions.
Those who adapt best and are easy to manipulate get a prize, like bears
in the circus. Is the prisoner who is easy to manipulate, control and adjust to prison,
less criminal, more social and ready to return to life in society? The authors of this
draft do not even address these questions.
As a person who studied prison science not in a state academy, but in
prison itself, I can assert that the national "correctional labor" system and
the science that supports it are completely immoral, designed to destroy the very basis of
the personality. It encourages reporting on other prisoners, looking out only for oneself,
and generally all sorts of traits that Russian culture as a whole considers base. This
draft has nothing to do with its declared morality. Research conducted by our Center shows
that the national correctional system has and continues to encourage growth of
professional and organized crime, while breeding many other negative (social, cultural,
demographic etc.) consequences for society. Considering all these factors, the legislative
project should certainly have been subjected to a great deal more critical expertise, lest
the project result in the same problems as were caused by similar reforms in the 1960's.
The means of categorizing prisoners suggested in the report — by
severity of offense, recidivism, and behavior — make for doubtful public policy. A man
who murders his drinking companion, as a rule, doesn't differ much from a thief or a
repeat offender, but all of them are different from professional, pathological criminals
or members of an organized gang.
Women and juveniles also constitute different groups from adult male
prisoners. Nevertheless the same norm of living space, sanitary and hygienic conditions
and conditions affecting mental health are stipulated for all groups. Unlike the current
code, the draft suggests that female prisoners wear uniforms again.
According to this draft the most vulnerable groups of prisoners will
again be in the worst conditions. For example, a principle of serving sentences near the
place of residence is declared, but with the reservation that a suitable institution be
located nearby. This principle does not take reality in account. In all of Russia there
are only three colonies for girls, eleven colonies for women with children, 31 colonies
for women and 58 for juveniles.
Thus, those particular groups which most of all need to preserve social
ties and climate will be deprived of them. The draft, like many previous legislative acts,
has a great number of legal loopholes left to be filled by administrative decree rather
than legal action. While this is quite natural, administrative decisions are made to
improve functioning, and not with legal goals in mind.
The draft moreover preserves the paramilitary and centralized nature of
the penal system. NGOs developed a number of changes and amendments to this draft, I pass
them over to the working group.
I will repeat my personal opinion: it makes sense to stop discussing
drafts of the three codes until a general concept of the reform of the criminal justice
system is developed. In particular we suggest establishing a norm allowing, but not
obligating, the subjects of the Federation to set up their own penal bodies and
institutions. This is in full compliance with the constitutional standards on dividing
authority between federal and local government. It should be mentioned here that in his
address to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly4, the Russian President
said that the centralized nature of our penal system contradicted the constitution.
I would like to offer the participants of these hearings some
preliminary data from the Moscow Center for Prison Reform's (MCPR)5
monitoring of the implementation of the new federal law governing the handling of
detainees and those suspected or accused of committing crimes. This document is a vivid
illustration of my thesis that the law-making process is going on without proper
accounting for social, political, cultural and economic reality.
