PRISON REFORM

By Pavel Krasheninnikov

Pavel Krasheninnikov is chairman of the State Duma Committee on Legislation. He is former Justice Minister of the Russian Federation.

This paper was commissioned by Russia on Russia.

A major change in penal policy is an indispensable element of judicial reform in Russia. Leaving aside the human, financial and organisational aspects of his problem, what is needed is the comprehensive amendment of a whole range of legal acts, starting with the criminal, criminal-procedural and penitentiary codes.

On 19 May 2000, the State Duma unanimously passed the first reading of a bill pertaining to the penitentiary system. It is a comprehensive bill, containing no fewer than 59 amendments and additions to the current law. The main idea behind the bill is to diminish the adverse social consequences of Russian penal policy, which are at present extremely high. I list just a few examples.

It is appalling that the percentage of the Russian population in jail is higher than in any other country in the world. The prison population of Russia now stands at 1,084,000 people, more than in the whole of the USSR in the second half of the 1980s. Almost one in every three adult Russians either has criminal convictions himself or is closely related to someone who has.

Pre-trial detention centres and correctional facilities are so overcrowded that certain European organisations have described them as places of torture. The amount of space per person is 1 square metre, instead of the 4 square metres required by law. One should also mention the growing TB epidemic. One in every 10 prisoners is sick with tuberculosis. Nothing is done to combat this epidemic because of medicines shortages (only 20-25 per cent of needs are met), and because overcrowding makes it impossible to separate the sick from the healthy. As a result, people sick with an open form of tuberculosis are kept in the same cells as healthy people.

Among other harms, there is the damage done to the souls of inmates exposed for the first time to the criminal world.

Russian society has at last awoken to the terrible social consequences of this severe punitive regime. The popular wisdom used to be that these are inevitable by-products of the struggle against crime. Nobody ever doubted the validity of a popular film slogan, 'a thief must be in jail'.

Up until recently, suspects were arrested arbitrarily, without hesitation or reflection. As a result of such practices, one in four people kept in pre-trial detention centres is released because the charges against them have been dropped, or because other, non-custodial, forms of punishment are applied. Most of these people needn't have been arrested at all. But our laws are so formulated that they make it possible to arrest any offender. So this practice does not formally violate the law, although it certainly offends against morality.

The time that people are kept in detention without trial is unjustifiably long (twice as long as in the Soviet period), and law courts are not required to meet any deadlines at all. As a result, a person sometimes spends 5 to 7 years in jail without a court sentence. More than a thousand people have been in jail without a trial for more than three years. Under the new bill, a suspect cannot be kept in jail without trial for more than 12 months.

It is important to note that the bill requires that the severity of the punishment be tailored to the severity of the crime. Punishment is to be eased with regard to people who have not committed major crimes. You will not be able to put a person in jail for stealing a can of milk, a chicken or a bag of potatoes. Other measures will be used with regard to this group of people (house arrest or a written pledge not to leave town), and they will not be kept in custody. This is also the aim of the suggestion that those guilty of crimes of negligence, and those sentenced to up to 5 years imprisonment, should be sent into internal exile rather than to jail. (In Tsarist times this was a fairly successful practice.) This would spare thousands of convicted people the experience of pre-trial detention and penitentiaries.

A whole range of other measures have been suggested with regard to criminals who are not dangerous, all with the aim of making punishment less harsh and the conditions in which a person serves a sentence more humane. For instance, one recommendation would exempt women with children aged under 14 (and not as now under 8) from custodial punishment. Given that this institution was introduced in the interests of underage children, one has to be consistent. The bill will not ease punishment for serious criminals, people who have committed murder, rape, terrorist acts and other particularly dangerous deeds. On the contrary, punishment for such crimes may be made even harsher. This recommendation is prompted by the growth of serious crime in Russia.

All in all, these provisions establish a more nuanced approach to penal policy. Their consistent implementation would reduce the number held in pre-trial detention centres by 130,000 to 150,000, and the prison population by 250,000. This comes to a total of 400,000, which is roughly the number needed to eliminate overcrowding in Russian penitentiaries. The only alternative is to build new prisons, something that the state cannot afford to do. One prison costs the same amount as a large university. Suffice it to say that in 1999, only one pre-trial detention centre and one correctional facility were built, while the prison population increased by 46,000. So, strategies for cutting the number of those placed in custody and sent to jail must be found.

Such strategies have been proposed in the adopted bill. These are humane measures that meet international standards in combating crime and treating criminals. Practically all international organisations, including human rights groups, have vigorously supported the bill. We hope it will pass successfully through the corridors of the Federal Assembly and the presidency. It would mark a turning point in Russian penal policy.