Situation in UIS after Transfer to the RF Ministry of Justice

At the same time as the UIS was transferred from the MVD to the Ministry of Justice, the first national program of reducing the prison population was developed. In 1998, the MoJ drafted a bill that, if adopted, would have made it possible to gradually (within two years) reduce the number of prisoners by about a third. The government, however, effectively blocked the bill on its way to the State Duma, the national parliament. The most outspoken opponents of the bill were the MVD and the General Prosecutor’s Office of Russia. So the number of prisoners continued to grow steadily to reach, in June 2000, a maximum of 1,090,000 persons. Jumping a little ahead, we will note that MoJ’s top officials rely on the figures of May-June 2000 when they now report a 200,000 reduction of the number of inmates in their press-releases.

After the transfer of GUIN to the MoJ, the funding allocated from the federal budget to support the UIS has been growing continuously. Over the recent years, the per-prisoner annual funding has grown from USD700 (1996-1997) to USD1,100 (2002). There has been a dramatic improvement in supplying prisons with anti-tuberculosis medications and food. In 2001-2002, food spending ranged between 17 and 25 rubles per prisoner per day (compared to 0.70 rubles in the fall of 1998). Western foundations and NGOs have been working proactively to counter tuberculosis in prisons. In 2001 alone, they spent USD450,000,000 to this end (i.e. over USD400 per prisoner). These joint efforts have brought about certain achievements in terms of reducing the number of TB cases in penitentiaries as the number of cases per 1,000 prisoners have shrank from 97 in 1999 to 90 in 2002 (See Table 1 and Chart 2).

Beginning in 2000, the DOTS-plus program has been implemented at penitentiaries that relies on series 2 preparations to target the MDR-TB-1. However, as the factors that result in interruptions of the course of treatment have persisted, experts fear that the application of series 2 preparations may result in the emergence of MDR-TB-2 that will be resistant to all existing pharmaceuticals. And then the UIS, and later the society at large will have to face a form of tuberculosis that can be countered with no known method of treatment. The situation is aggravated further with the HIV-explosion, as HIV infection speeds up the development of the resistant forms of TB (MDR-TB-1 and MDR-TB-2). Moreover, HIV-infected persons often develop the open form of tuberculosis with no detectable symptoms, their TB in some cases cannot be spotted even with X-ray pictures, not to mention fluorography that until recently was believed to be the most reliable method of TB diagnostics. This is likely to have been the reason why the rated number of TB cases grew in 2002 to reach 99 cases per 1,000 inmates.

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