By Kenneth F. Hunt
Impunity Watch Reporter, Europe

MOSCOW, Russia – In a long overdue effort to upgrade antiquated prisons, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has ordered that career criminals be isolated from the general population of prisoners and placed in cell blocks instead than barracks.

Over 70 years ago, when Joseph Stalin ruled the USSR with an iron-fist, a penal system for prisoners was developed where inmates are arbitrarily separated into barracks with around 100 men regardless of the nature or severity of the crime committed.

Through today the vast majority of Russian prisoners are forced to live in these inhumane and over-crowded barracks or penal colonies often in remote areas in Siberia, no different from the prison camps instituted by Stalin in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Of Russia’s 862,000 prisoners, 724,000 today are housed in barracks.

President Medvedev, who went to law school, has ordered a gradual, three-stage plan to rid Russia of its barracks housing system. Ultimately, all 755 penal colonies will be abolished as a result of these reforms.

The first stage involves moving recidivists, the so-called “career” or “hardened” criminals, to separate colonies in order to isolate the general prison population. According to one press account, 64,000 of the 149,000 recidivist prisoners have already been transferred.

The second stage, which will not be complete until 2016, involves separating petty criminals from violent first-time offenders.

Finally, by 2020, the third stage will be completed when recidivists are moved into newly constructed prisons that have cell blocks.

All of these changes replace a system where prison wardens and guards used social groupings within the barracks to self-enforce order in the barracks.

Human rights groups praised the decision. The Deputy Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Reform, Lyudmila Alpern, expressed pleasure at getting rid of penal colonies where conflicts were “resolved through a crude hierarchy” and where prisoners lived like “male tribe[s]”.

For more information, please see:

THE CRIME REPORT – Russian Prison Upgrade to Take Career Criminals Out of Barracks – 24 March 2010

SCOTSMAN – Stalin’s Gulags facing reform – 24 March 2010

NEW YORK TIMES – Russia to Alter System of Penal Colonies – 22 March 2010