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English Language Page Criminal laws and regulations of the Russian Federation contain rather few documents governing the treatment of women in the system of criminal justice that approach the problem in a gender-specific manner. It can be stated with confidence that men are the primary object of regulation in the system of criminal justice, while women and children constitute, in a sense, certain minorities that have to adapt to the life of the “big brother” and suffer great and at times irreversible losses in the process. It must also be considered that the varied social problems and mass-scale violations of human rights, so characteristic of the situation in Russia both in the past and today, are particularly aggravated in penal colonies and pretrial detention facilities. However, criminal laws of the Russian Federation contain at least some articles that govern the treatment of women in the system of criminal justice. These articles primarily aim to make possible discharge of parental responsibilities by female inmates. The most important provisions of this kind include: • a woman may not be sentenced to the death penalty (Article 59 of the RF Criminal Code); • execution of a sentence may be postponed and then reduced or canceled for pregnant women or women who have children under 14 years of age, with the exception of those “sentenced to imprisonment for terms longer than five years for grave and specially grave crimes” (Article 82 of the RF Criminal Code); • convicted pregnant women and convicted women who have underage children and serve their sentences in penal colonies, with the exception of those sentenced to imprisonment for terms longer than five years for grave and specially grave personal crimes, may be granted by court a suspension of sentence execution until the child reaches the age of fourteen years (Article 177 of the RF Criminal Implementation Code (UIK)); • a suspected or indicted woman may be kept in detention together with her children who are younger than three years of age, in which case they are provided improved living conditions, specialized medical service, increased rations and rates of clothing, while restrictions on the duration of daily out-of-ward strolls are lifted and placements into the penalty isolation ward prohibited (Article 30 of Federal Law “On Detention of Suspects and Persons Indicted with Crimes”); • at penal (correctional) institutions, nurseries may be set up where children of female inmates can be provided care until they reach the age of three years; pregnant women and women with children have the right to extra food donations via mail and made during visits, and to specialized medical service (Article 100 of UIK); • pregnant female inmates or those who have children in the nurseries receive at least 50% of their wages, pensions, or other incomes(2) at their personal accounts (Article 107 of UIK); • female convicts who have infants at the penitentiary’s nursery, and female convicts relieved from work because of their pregnancy or recently giving birth, may not be placed into a punishment ward or wards of a prison cell type (Article 117 of UIK); • convicted pregnant women or convicted women who have underage children together with them may not be subjected to an enhanced severity prison regime (Article 130 of UIK). PECULIARITIES OF FEMALE CRIME According to criminologists, the share of female crime and the number of female prison population have seen a noticeable decrease as compared to the last quarter of the 19th century. According to I. Foynitsky,(3) a prominent Russian criminologist whose best known academic results were produced in the last quarter or the 19th century, at that time, women accounted for up to 20% of the total crimes in Europe and made up 10—16% of prison population. Findings of Ya. Ghilinsky,(4) a contemporary criminologist, suggest that now female crime accounts for approximately 11—15% of the total crime, with female inmates’ share in the total prison population averaging less than 5%. Also, the structure of female crime has seen a significant change as compared to the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. The 51% of the bodily harm-inducing crimes, mostly murders (Foynitsky), have been replaced with no more than 15—20% of such female crimes now. The reasons for such a high share of what is now known as grave and particularly grave crimes (mostly murders of spouses and children) in the structure of female crime a hundred years ago lie, in the view of researchers,(5) in the lack of rights on the part of married women and women having extramarital children. However, even in the modern world, familial unhappiness and a high level of violence in the family are the primary causes of criminalization and marginalization of women. Article 106 of the RF Criminal Code: Murdering by a mother of her newly born child during or immediately after its birth, or murdering by a mother of her newly born child in conditions of a psychologically damaging situation or in a state of mental disorder that does not rule out sanity, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term of up to five years. This is the only exclusively “female” article of the RF Criminal Code; the others equally refer to both sexes. Contemporary Russian criminology does not give much attention to female crime (unlike, for instance, American criminology that has been studying “female criminology” as a separate field for over 20 years). Apparently, this is because experts do not estimate the contribution of female crime into the overall picture of crime as significant. Such indifference to female problems in society generates, among other things, female crime itself. According to O. Mironov, Ombudsman of the Russian Federation, Violence against women is one of the most widely occurring violations of human rights in the contemporary world… Women killed or bodily injured as a result of family/home conflicts hold first place among various categories of people who have fallen victim to violent crimes… According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, 14 000 women are killed by their husbands every year, and another 2000 commit suicide… The concept than presents violence as a manifestation of family quarrels caused by alcoholism, poor living conditions is not true to life. There is abundant evidence that family violence can be observed in all social groups irrespective of their social statuses and living standards… The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation contains a list of crimes against the life, health, and immunity of the individual. Disappointingly, family violence is not listed among such other crimes.(6) Thus, criminal statistics of the 19th century was dominated by husband killings evident of the despair of women who would not settle to their lack of rights. Today, on the other hand, the number of wife killings (that has reached an unbelievable 14 000 cases a year(7) ) is five times the number of husband killings, which is a manifestation, among other things, of an attempt by men to reconstitute their lost rights and status. Violence in the family breeds female crime, to include violent crimes. Penal colonies are reporting a growing number of women convicted for violent crimes against their: husbands, boyfriends, fathers, etc. Violent crimes of this kind hardly ever win any lenience in the courtroom. In particular, women accused of murder or attempted murder of their husbands or boyfriends, who had been sadistically turning their life into a living hell, are normally indicted with “regular” murder under Article 105 of the Criminal Code, while Article 107 — murder in the state of disturbance — is hardly ever used, as a costly expert evaluation is required to prove the fact of disturbance, and no one would spend a penny on women of this kind. They almost never have a good lawyer either, as lawyers' fees are quite high, so accused women get at least six to seven years behind the bars. Their children end up in orphanages or on streets, and replenish the social reserve of the criminal world. While laws adopted in two past years, in particular the new Criminal Procedure Code, have by now resulted, according to the RF Ministry of Justice, in a reduction of prison population by an estimated 200 000 persons (in particular, the number of underage convicts has halved), women’s colonies have not been emptied, on the contrary, they are filled to the brim. For instance, YaI-22/6 high security female colony operated by the department of penalty execution (UIN) of the Oryol region holds almost twice as many inmates than its capacity (1600 prisoners in a 850-person facility), which makes the already severe life of female colony inmates outright unbearable. LIVING CONDITIONS IN PENITENTIARIES Transferal The 89 subjects of the Russian Federation have a total of just 40 female penal colonies and only three colonies for underage girls. This means that women from every second subject of the Russian Federation have to be taken to a different region, and they will be lucky if to an adjacent region (often, this issue is resolved against the interest of the convict and her family but in the interest of the system: convicts are simply taken to a facility that is less overpopulated, with the issue of the facility being extremely remote from their home town not considered), and each of the colonies for the underage girls houses convicts from 30 subjects of the Russian Federation. Female convicts have to travel great and at times enormous distances. Women, in particular, face greater suffering from the hard conditions of transferals. (It should be stressed that Russian prisoners consider the conditions of transferals even harsher than the conditions in pretrial detention facilities (SIZO), which are internationally acknowledged as torturous). “Movement of inmates to institutions of confinement” (Article 76 of UIK) can take a very long time. In many cases, the duration of the travel is not directly related to the actual distance. For instance, Novy Oskol, where females from Perm serve their time, is about 2100 kilometers away from Perm, and a regular passenger train covers this distance in two days. However, it may take convicts a whole of two months to get there, as they have to pass through five transit prisons, or, to be exact, collection stations of five regional pretrial detention facilities, in each of which the convicts may spend as long as a week or even more. Cells are dirty and overcrowded, with neither individual sleeping places nor linen, there are no normal meals or medical service. Moreover, transportation itself is hazardous for human life and health — you can find yourself in the same cell with a person suffering from a contagious disease, get no daily ration, or get salted herring in the place of regular food — to force the body to retain water so that there are fewer calls of nature: the guards would not want to take you out to relieve yourself an extra time. As evidenced by the inmates of the Nevel colony (the interviews were conducted at the end of 2000), minors are taken to the Nevel female penal colony via the Pskov pretrial facility from other subjects of the Russian Federation, such as the Leningrad, Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Novgorod regions, the Republic of Komi and the Republic of Karelia. Out of 19 interviewees, five spent more than a month on the road, four — more than a week. Fourteen respondents said they had received no food; three (out of those who traveled a long time) recalled herring and bread; two reported dry rations issued at night in the ward. Seventeen interviewees mentioned too little food and drink; nine had not been taken to a lavatory at all; three had been taken once a day; four — twice a day. Four interviewees (long-time travelers) reported beatings on the way: two had been beaten by the guards, the other two by fellow inmates, also teenagers but stronger physically. Provided below are quotations from essays by inmates from the Ryazan and Novy Oskol colonies, written not in 1937 but in 2000—2001, already in the 21st century. Elena K., 18 years of age: How I traveled from the prison to the zone?(8) We left Ekaterinburg on May 17, 2000, at 4 a.m. in an autozak.(9) We were six little girls and one 19-year old girl. So we went to the railroad station, to the stolypin.(10) The guards jumped out: don’t look around, run across the tracks to the railroad car. We made it quick, what with our heavy bags, and here we are already in the car. At first they locked 12 of us in one compartment, we asked the chief and he left only little girls in that compartment. We traveled about a day or a day and a half to reach Ulyanovsk. We jumped out and into the autozak, the guards were cheerful and we sang songs to them. So we arrived, and after the body search they took us to the cell. The cell was awful, dirty, cold, damp, dark, but you can talk to the boys. I saw a hole in the floor, a hole that you can stick your arm through, it was called the “holster.” Two days later we had to leave, but we did not want to, as I had met a boy and he was saying he loved me, but it is all rubbish. We were put in a stolypin again, and we were in Ryazan in less than a day; so we are taken up to the cell, and its horrible: about 40 to 45 people there, ten minors, and the rest were grown-ups, grown up women, and “male-women,” and you know… It’s good that we stayed there for only three days, and then were taken in an autozak to the zone… Tamara Ch., 17 years of age: The first day of the trip was terrible. We were treated like dogs as we were taken from the IVS (temporary detention ward) to the pretrial detention facility. We were put into an autozak and taken to the stolypin. The autozak was dark and dirty with hardly any air in it, and when we were loaded into the railroad car, we were thrown about as if we were things to throw away, and those who moved slowly were beaten with truncheons on the back. There were bars around me, and behind those bars there were boys, dozens of them, and they would thrust themselves against the bars and ask you a lot of questions about everything. My impression was as if I found myself in a jungle, and this feeling will stay with me for my entire life. There were much too many of us in the triplet (railroad car), no room to move, and there was a long way ahead of us, we were hungry, sleepy, and longed for a wash. They would take you out to relieve yourself only once during the whole day, and some guards wouldn’t take you out at all, so girls had to pee in bottles and plastic bags, it’s such cruelty. They scattered a load of dry chloride lime in the car, and we had to breathe it the entire travel. Forwarding is horrible, and to live through it, you need stamina, and it affects you psychologically, people become even harsher. I’ve been through all this, and there was no one to help me or protect me . Anastasia P., 17 years of age: On March 5, I was taken out of the cell and put into an autozak; I spent two hours in it as we traveled to stolypin; then I was put into a booth for a three days’ ride to Yaroslavl; there they put me into a sort of small cell with a toilet and a bench and a thick layer of dirt on the floor. The next morning they transferred me up into a transit cell; there I spent four days in the stale air among a tight crowd of women cursing like sailors; we took turns to sleep and in the four days I slept three times and caught lice from an old woman, but, fortunately, I was promptly treated and got rid of them. On March 9, there was another forwarding to Ryazan — that’s where there was real hell — I slept for two months on the floor, then they shut us up for a quarantine for 21 days, and finally they called us up and took to the colony. Finally, this torture was over. The recollections of these girls speak volumes. The same fate befalls grown women. They often describe their forwarding experiences in the same vein. For example, YaI-22/6 high security colony (Oryol region) — and there are only two such colonies in Russia: this one and another one in Byereznyaki (Perm region) — houses women that are brought from 45 subjects of the Russian Federation. To note, the head of the colony is convinced that this is pure formality, as there is no serious difference between the general and high security regimes for women, so high security wards can be set up in general colonies without much effect on the appropriate penalty execution. Having worked at penitentiaries for over a quarter of a century, this man appreciates the difference between male and female “zones” and can see no reason why a woman should be taken so far away from her home, her family, if there is any, and tortured for months at “stolypins.” By way of comparison, the Criminal Code of Poland, for instance, has a separate article that regulates penalty in relation to women: Polish lawmakers, considering feminine psychological features (of which they see attachment to family as the primary one) have specified in the law that a woman has the right to serve her sentence close to her home. Living, Sanitary, And Hygienic Conditions In 1999, the Center for Assistance to Criminal Justice Reform undertook a monitoring project in six facilities for women — three colonies and three pretrial detention centers — to look for a correlation between the existing practices of keeping women in institutions of confinement and the UN Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners (SMR).(11) The study has revealed that: The core problem of accommodation of women in Russia’s penitentiary system is that the conditions of serving the sentence that were shaped in the Soviet period reflect neither psychological nor physiological features inherent in women, i.e., women are kept as men or, more precisely, as certain averaged-out human beings without regard to sexual, age-related, or other individual characteristics.(12) This is manifested in a host of ways, and most vividly in the fact that women of childbearing age are issued no hygienic items (absorbent tissues or pads) that they need during menstruation. Russian legislators have provided for no requisite hygienic materials to be issued to female inmates. In some cases, prison officials make attempts to redress the lawmakers' crucial error, but they are hardly ever capable of coping with the problem single-handedly. Women, having no sufficient means or technical capabilities to purchase pads (they are not always available in the kiosk, and the convicts do not always have enough funds on their personal accounts), make varied attempts to find a way out of the situation. Some cases have been recorded when women convicts used for tampons technological cotton that they stole from a garment factory. In the opinion of the gynecologist of one of the colonies, this practice results in serious complications in the urogenital apparatus. Responding to a question about sanitary/hygienic conditions, a female inmate said: We tear up clothes and mattresses for “hygienic needs.” Laundry can be done only once a week in the laundry facility, no matter what your menstrual cycle is. You cannot do your laundry in the sinks of the barrack — you'll be reported and punished. Many colonies for women are overfilled, some hold twice the maximum capacity, resulting in crowds in the huge sleeping rooms designed for 50—100 persons. As if using two-tier beds were not enough, in some cases wooden boards are installed between upper-tier beds and also used as sleeping places. Such structures are practiced in some colonies, for example, in Kozlovka. In other institutions, they do not use boards but put beds as close to each other as possible. The result is a great health risk from over-crowdedness, a poor physical and mental health situation at the institution. All these facts are evidence of non-observance of the minimal space standards for inmates. As a rule, the bathing facility is available once a week at the most, as well as a chance to wash the undergarments and clothes. Bed linen is washed by the laundry once every 10—14 days. At the sleeping wards, there are so-called “hygienic rooms” that often have no hot water, and doing laundry there is also banned. In such conditions, considering the continual shortage of free time (as inmates in female colonies work in several shifts with overtime, often a total of 10 to 12 hours a day), it is often difficult to maintain cleanliness and tidiness that are not only needed to stay healthy but are also a requirement of the routine. However, as you enter a sleeping ward in women’s residential building, the first thing that catches the eye is the blinding whiteness of the beds. It may appear as a sign of cleanliness and comfort but is, in fact, the so-called “white bed-making,” a special technique of creating the “camp beauty” in overcrowded dormitories that are always prepared to receive inspections of all sorts, ministerial and others. There is no place for inmates in such bedrooms. Before retreat is beaten, no inmate can even sit down on her shining bed, no matter how tired she might be. In the residential buildings, there is a marked shortage of furniture. Those inmates who are particularly tired would usually have to sit or even lie down on the floor before the retreat time. Also, colonies always have difficulties with supplies of envelopes and other stationery, which limits the possibility of inmates to stay in contact with their families and file complaints to relevant power bodies. Health and Medical Service The female population of Russian prisons is, to put it mildly, not entirely healthy. According to different estimates, between one third and one half of women arrive at institutions of confinement infected with venereal diseases, syphilis in particular. Also, trichomoniasis is a most widely spread disease. Over 5% of female inmates (i.e., more than 3000) are HIV-infected. HIV is often accompanied with hepatitis C, another deadly contagious disease. 3—5% of women suffer from active forms of tuberculosis. Also, represented widely are alcoholism, drug addiction, somatic diseases as (in descending order) cardiovascular (hypertension), gynecological (hysteromyoma, other tumors of inner genitals). At least 20% suffer from various mental disorders, including serious ones. The above statistics are estimated; precise data on diseases of female inmates are not available. Medical aid in the penitentiary system is scarce and cannot provide real solutions to inmates’ health problems. However, there have been achievements in the last three years, particularly in the treatment of tuberculosis, which mostly came with aid resources of such international organizations as the WHO, MSF, ICRC, etc. Colonies get their supplies of pharmaceuticals in a centralized way, but these supplies are clearly insufficient. The rest depends on the medical workers, their energy, professionalism, and good will. Unfortunately, in many cases, prison doctors either have insufficient qualifications or start to behave like the worst kind of prison guards. There are known cases when requests for medical assistance were refused. Doctors often would not grant patients sick leaves, even if the latter are running high temperature. The reason behind this practice is that physicians tend to suspect the inmate of simulating illness. To note, sometimes such suspicious prove to be grounded. On the other hand, this does not justify the practice dangerous to the health of those who happen to be truly ill. Particular difficulties arise when high-qualification medical aid in a good hospital is required. The difficulties have to do with the need to escort the inmate to common hospitals, whose workers are not always prepared to spend their time and pharmaceuticals on patients from a penitentiary. Escorting itself can present a problem — there may be objections from operative workers who view such endeavors as undermining the operational situation in the colony, and this may be the actual reason for a refusal of the treatment. The penitentiary system operates hospitals of its own, the so-called inter-regional hospitals, where patients are forwarded from across Russia. There are such hospitals in St. Petersburg and Rostov, a mental hospital in Rybinsk, and a very large hospital in Saratov. The following is known about the last two hospitals. At the end of December, 2002, while visiting a female colony, the author of this article talked to some women who had been sent for treatment and then returned to the colony. One of them, an elderly woman, was treated in the mental hospital in Rybinsk (Yaroslavl region), and it should be noted that she had tried hard to be sent to that hospital. The expectation was that she would stay there for at least a year. However, she was back in three months as she could not bear the treatment any longer. The treatment consisted in administration of large dozes of Haloperidol, a highly toxic preparation of the aminazine line that causes a wide range of side effects, including symptoms of Parkinson’s. The drug is badly tolerated by patients, and is usually administered in combination with correctors that attenuate the tremor and other side effects. At the hospital, she was given no correctors, and moreover, she reported that the hospital used Haloperidol to treat all conditions. Head of the colony’s medical service, a psychiatrist himself, confirmed the patient’s opinion of that medical institution and said that he tried to help his patients on the spot and would send them to Rybinsk only under extraordinary circumstances. We have also obtained information about the Inter-Regional Ministerial General Hospital of Saratov. Somatic patients transferred there in accordance with all the rules of forwarding within a period from a week to a month often return having received no medical aid. The reason, as it was discovered later, was simple — the hospital would provide treatment only in exchange for financial compensation, either for cash to be paid by the patient’s relatives or against a bank transfer from the inmate’s personal account. If there is no money there is no treatment, and the patient will be forwarded back in the same or worse condition as he set out for “treatment.” In doctors’ opinion, this is a new but increasingly popular practice in the penitentiary system. WORK IN PENAL (CORRECTIONAL) INSTITUTIONS Article 91 of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation reads that “a standard working week may not exceed 40 hours,” while Article 99 states that “working overtime may be permitted only upon the worker’s written consent and with approval of an elected trade union body of the organization in question… Overtime work must not exceed four hours for an individual worker in any two consecutive days, and total annual overtime work may not exceed 120 hours.” As regards labor regulations for prisoners, Article 104 of the RF Criminal Implementation Code stipulates: The duration of working hours of persons convicted to imprisonment, labor protection rules, safety rules, and industrial sanitary rules are set in compliance with labor laws of the Russian Federation. The time when working hours (shifts) begin and the time they end are defined with shift schedules set by administrations of penal correctional establishments in coordination with administrations of facilities at which inmates work. Nonetheless, women work 10—12 hours a day, in most cases at garment factories located at penal establishments, often with no days off, with their monthly remuneration amounting to 300 roubles (approximately 10 US dollars) or even less than that. To clarify, garment factories of female penal colonies receive an abundance of orders mainly for making camouflage uniforms and uniforms of other types. However, these orders, awarded through middlemen, always entail tough deadlines and very low compensation. Therefore, only very undemanding and doomed to obedience workers (refusal to work is classed as a gross violation of the confinement regime(13) and is penalized with incarceration in the punishment ward (ShIZO)(14) ) can accept such orders. It should be stressed that regular garment factories will not even bid for such orders, as they are formulated with slave labor in mind. Also, convict workers of such a garment factory do not choose their jobs of their own free will, but are commandeered to undertake certain assignment. Not all of them are professional seamers, and not all have good abilities to do such work. The equipment of prison garment factories is obsolete and worn out. All this factors combine to make hard labor. Women doing such work (often on a conveyor belt) age quickly, lose stamina, break physically and psychologically. The stand-point of colonies’ administrations is understandable: the garment factory earnings, even if very small, make it possible for the administration to improve the inmates’ rations and address a range of other social, living, and medical problems of the colony. Prisoners also use the pittance they make to at least buy tea and tobacco at the camp’s store. But this does not change the fact that conditions of labor in Russian penitentiaries constitute a direct violation of Russian laws and international human rights standards. OPERATIVE MEASURES AT FEMALE COLONIES An operative service generally exists under Article 11 of Federal Law “On Operative and Investigative Activities in the Russian Federation” of March 13, 1992, and specific provisions are contained in Article 14 of Federal Law “On Establishments and Bodies Executing Criminal Penalties in the Form of Confinement” of July 23, 1993. According to Article 84 of the Criminal Implementation Code: The operative/investigative function of penal correctional establishments includes the following objectives: — ensuring personal security of inmates, personnel of the establishment, and other persons; — uncovering, prevention, and exposing any crimes and delinquencies prepared or committed at penal correctional establishments; — retrieval, in accordance with due procedures, of convicts who commit escape from penal correctional establishments and convicts evading their penalty; — detection and uncovering crimes committed by convicts before arrival to the penal correctional establishment. Among the objectives listed above, only the first two can be deemed actually related to the functioning of a penal establishment. The others, as suggested by logic and common sense, should rather be dealt with by relevant local bodies. However, even though the first two objectives (security and detection of crimes) are attained by specialized operative services within a penal establishment (this arrangement is used only in former USSR republics), their operations actually hampers implementation of the goals of the penitentiary system as formulated in SMR. In practice, operative work in a penal establishment degenerates to recruiting agents by all available means, in most cases totally illegal and immoral, because inmates have no freedom of choice. It is obvious that the situation in female colonies is fundamentally different from that in male colonies. Answering the question, “Where is it harder to work for a warden, in a female colony or in a male colony?” one long-time warden said, “In the territory of a male colony, you must have an eye on the back of your head to watch the situation, listen to conversations, pick up any sounds and even thoughts of the inmates, as you are in danger at all times. Women are much easier, they are not such a threat for us.” In spite of this, the rules and conditions in female penal institutions are little different from those in male penitentiaries: the same regime and operational rules apply, the same general approach, the same level of rigor. Female institutions are staffed with operative workers just as male institutions are. These operatives, as a rule, strive to prove that they are indispensable. At each establishment, there is a continuous competition between their "correctional" and "operative" functions, and quite often the latter prevail. To quote an inmate, “Operatives poke their noses in such dirty things! They’d interfere in relations between women — at zones, love is homosexual, you know, it is very widely spread, half of all women are like this. They set up provocations. And then sorting-out begins.” An operative whom we had to work with during our trips to female establishments, asked our psychologist how “love triangles” should be dealt with. Clearly, this issue should be tackled by psychologists and counselors and not by operative workers. Such activities of operative departments runs contrary to the correctional function of penitentiaries. PUNISHMENT WARD (SHIZO) According to Article 115 of UIK, the use of punishment wards (ShIZO) is intended as a penalty measure against inmates of penitentiaries. There are also such measures as the reprimand and the disciplinary fine. However, these measures are of totally different nature. For what reason can you find yourself in a punishment ward? For a failure to meet the target output figure, for refusal to work (since 2001, this has also been a gross violation), for being rude with prison personnel or other inmates, for smoking outside the smoking area, for homosexual relations, and for a lot of other things. The decision as to which form of punishment should be applied belongs with the prison administration, and thus depends entirely the colony’s head. But punishment ward is the domain of the operative staff. Here, they exhort pressure on the inmates and recruit agents. The inmates are often subjected to beatings and to other “special means,” such as hand-cuffing. Based on our on-site observations, a punishment ward is usually a cell for two or four inmates, where benches used as sleeping places are raised and locked to the wall during the day. In some colonies, there even are no stools, only the locked benches and the floor, and a prison toilet bowl. Inmates are lucky if the floor is not concrete, as standing for 18 hours a day is impossible, and the penalized woman cannot help but sit or lie down on the floor. In some colonies, the role of stools is played by round stubs of some sort, 15—20 centimeters in diameter. These stubs are what the bench rests on when it is unlocked from the wall. Sitting on these stubs is impossible, it hurts and leaves bruises on the buttocks. Stools are more humane devices. However, if their steel frame rises above the wooden seat they can also contribute to the punishment. And this is not all. The penalized woman’s clothes, save the underpants, are taken away, and she is issued a black or dark-gray wide-sleeved robe, on which the word “ShIZO” is either embroidered or panted white. In this conditions, she serves her 15 day term (this is the maximum ShIZO penalty period, but it also happen to be the minimum one in most cases), in the winter and in the summer alike. In some establishments, women are issued neither a mattress nor linen, and they sleep on uncovered benches that are unlocked only for 6 hours at night. On numerous occasions, human rights defenders discussed this penalty’s excessive brutality with administrations of different colonies. Opinions varied, but even people who were not otherwise ferocious were used to this practice, and they were hard pressed to even imagine something more humane. It is quite illustrative, on the other hand, that when asked why no pantyhose were issued to women lest their genital organs are damaged by the cold, a colony head responded, “Why, they will hang themselves on those pantyhose, and I will be held responsible!” This shows quite clearly that the administrations have an appreciation of the severity of confinement in punishment wards. A woman may lose her sanity over the 15 days spent in ShIZO, especially if she is already worn out physically and psychologically. ShIZO is an inadequately cruel penalty, and this practice must be cut short. The author of this article has been to prisons in the UK, France, the USA, Poland and never seen anything that can be even remotely compared to such outrageous brutality. In all those countries, penalty isolation of a routine offender presupposes an individual cell with all the necessary commodities: a bed, a mattress, bed linen, the same food as received by the other inmates, an hour walk. Such isolation is considered a strict punishment, because it involves certain worsening of conditions of confinement, the impossibility to converse with other inmates, but mainly because of weaker prospects of an early release, and an early release is one of the convict’s most important hopes. Strict Conditions of Confinement Article 87 of UIK reads, “Within a single penal correctional colony, inmates may be kept under standard, lenient, and strict conditions of confinement, in line with the colony’s regime.” The intent is to let inmates feel the difference between their conditions of confinement depending on their behavior and attitude toward serving their time. So, there are the progressive (involving improvement of conditions), and the regressive (worsening of conditions) transfers. The basis for a regressive transfer is constituted when the inmate is recognized “a persistent offender of the confinement procedure,” which is governed by Article 116 of UIK. This article covers both men and women. However, there is a world of difference between men and women in terms of their psychologies, the nature and degree of their hazardousness, particularly between men and women transferred in the strict confinement conditions. In male “zones,” the strict conditions of confinement are applied to hardened criminals who are carriers of the harsh jail subculture, the colony’s administration tries to keep them isolated lest they may have an adverse effect on the other inmates, and in addition, some of them may be dangerous not only from an ideological perspective. Normally, the strict conditions confinement zone is an isolated barrack located in a separate inner zone. How is this type of confinement implemented in female colonies, and who are the targets? In practice, the strict conditions of confinement may vary. For example, they are real prison cells for four people in the Vladimir and Oryol female colonies, cells for 50 persons in Kozlovka (the Chuvash Republic), for 30 people in the Nizhnii Novgorod colony. The strictness of conditions is primarily manifested in limited duration of the walk, keeping of convicts in a continuously locked cell, reduced rations if production output targets are not met (in strict conditions of confinement, women also have to work, most often weave nets). And of course, there are no leniencies, no early release unless after transfer to lenient conditions, which is almost impossible. We have used questionnaires to run a survey among inmates subjected to the strict conditions. Our respondents were 31 female inmates. Ten of the interviewees spent less than a year in the colony, nine between one year and two years, twelve — more than two years (more accurately, between two and four years). All respondents reported that they had been familiarized with the Internal Rules of Correctional Institutions upon arrival at the colony, but not in full. Three respondents indicated they had been briefed in writing; four others reported, “We listen to a tape recording of the Internal Rules every day.” (Apparently, a tape recording of the Internal Rules was played to them at their private time.) Ten persons have been under the strict regime of confinement for less than six months; 14 persons — less than a year; five persons for over a year; two persons for over three years. Nine persons reported that before they had been transferred to the strict conditions, they had had two counts of violation; six people reported three counts; three persons reported multiple violations. Notably, four reported that they had been put into strict conditions from the very beginning with no preceding violations of the regime. In addition, the women reported that the strict conditions often applied to them upon arrival at the colony, if they had committed many violations of regime in prison prior to their transferal to the camp, and named specific examples of such offenses: communication between cells, transit of notes, rudeness to “the girl on duty.” What offenses do you have to commit to find yourself in the strict conditions of confinement? Below is a list of delinquencies based on the inmates’ responses to the questionnaire: cursing, a verbal quarrel with a friend, a fistfight, a theft, a refusal to work, smoking outside the smoking area, a purchase-and-sale deal, inflicting an injury on self, including attempted suicide, a visit to a different barrack. Are these offenses gross enough to justify subjecting the offenders to strict isolation? How dangerous are these women to others? The common says tells us “no,” but the conditions in female penitentiaries imitate those in male ones, including the conditions of strict regime confinement. To stress, these conditions are unjustifiably severe per se but prove to have a particularly cruel and destructive impact on women. Responding to the question whether they had been examined by a doctor before their transfer into the strict regime confinement, only four responded in the positive, 17 said no, and five left this question unanswered. Judging by the reaction of the respondents, the situation is also unfavorable in terms of the prosecutor’s oversight. A third of respondents believe they cannot turn to the prosecutor either to appeal their sentences or for any other reason. Another third leave this question unanswered. Seven persons think they could apply, and the comment of the rest is, “You can, but it is useless,” “Prosecutors will leave, but we will have to stay.” Asked about beatings, 14 persons replied in the negative, 10 abstained from answering. Out of the six answering yes, three had been beaten by the personnel, two by fellow inmates, and one checked the “other” option. SUPPLIES AND MATERIAL WELL-BEING According to the most optimistic estimates, only 25% of convicted women receive reliable supplies (mailed or personally delivered parcels) from relatives. Half of convicted women have never been married, half of marriages fall apart during the term of confinement.(15) Clothes and foodstuffs received from relatives are widely traded in the colony in spite of prohibitions. According to Article 88 of the Criminal Implementation Code, an inmate can use the camp shop (“kiosk”) “to buy, without restrictions, foodstuffs and primary necessities under an out-of-account procedure using funds earned during the period of serving the sentence, and funds received in the form of pensions or social benefits.” The kiosk is an indispensable element of prison life. Here, one can buy items of the hygiene, envelopes (very important items in prisons, continuously in short supply), tea (also serving as a cash equivalent), tobacco, candy, and items like soap, toothpaste, etc. Lack of a normally functioning shop further aggravates the suffering of inmates. However, in the conditions of contemporary penal establishment, a normally functioning kiosk is a rarity. Even at those correctional facilities where the administrations are deeply concerned about the wellbeing of inmates, they have to be very inventive to stock the shop with basic necessity. Also, one has to pay cash for goods, and there is often none on penitentiaries’ accounts. PAROLE, DEFERENCE OF PENALTY, TRAVELING OUTSIDE THE PENAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION Women have more legal rights to early release than men. In addition to general eligibility for parole, women may be granted a deference of penalty in connection with to providing care to children under the age of 14. The fact that men are not granted by law a similar right provides evidence that in the lawmaker’s mind males are not as much parents as women, which on the one hand, reflect the actual situation in Russian society to a certain extent and, on the other hand, fixes it solid. The right of women to a deferment is regulated by Article 82 of the RF Criminal Code and Article 177 of UIK and does not apply to women “convicted for a term of over five years for grave and particularly grave personal crimes.” As a consequence, women convicted for attempted murders of their husbands cannot be granted a deferment. A woman may be released by way of deferment as early as in the courtroom, but courts normally do not make such decisions in relation to those sentenced to confinement, even in cases where the woman is already pregnant or has given birth at the pretrial detention facility. Courts prefer to forward them to the penitentiary and delegate the right to decide on the fate of children and their mothers to the colony’s administration. At a colony, such a decision can normally be made six months after the arrival of the convict at the earliest, if it is made at all. The decision is made in accordance with an established procedure: the fate of the woman is decided by a court if the administration files the relevant request. However, the colony administrations, as a rule, perceive making a request for a convict as taking on at least partial responsibility for the convict’s behavior in the future if she is granted a deferment. The convict must travel home (if she has no home there is no deferment) and register with the local enforcement inspectorate, after which the administration of the colony is notified thereof. Actually, the head of the colony remains in a way responsible for the fate of the convict even after the deferment is granted, and this responsibility in many cases overweighs the best interest of the child. For instance, during our visit to a standard-regime female colony at Kozlovka in the summer of 2001, we learned that the administration never uses this arrangement at all. A similar situation exists in relation to short-term (up to seven days) leaves and vacations (equal in length to the duration of the annual paid vacation) that involve going outside of the penal facility. Leaves may be granted to convicts under Article 97 of UIK. Women in particular may be granted a short-term leave “to put children in the care of relatives or into an orphanage” and “for visiting their children” (Paragraph 2, Article 97 of UIK). This humane measure, so important for female inmates from the point of view of maintaining relations with the loved ones and indispensable for social rehabilitation of the convict, is in fact completely erased by subordinate regulations and circulars, and the existing practices. The fear that a convict may not return in time, in which event it is the administration of the penitentiary that must take operative measures to find and return their inmate, is so strong that the head of the colony would usually do anything to stay away from deciding favorably on such issues. As long as the responsibility for the convict’s behavior while on leave is not legislatively vested with the convict himself or herself, this very important rehabilitation measure will never work. As regards release on parole, several negative factors apply. For example, many cases have been observed when a “positively characterized” convict with no record of rules violation, and willing to perform with high quality various jobs for establishment, would not be granted no timely parole, but, on the contrary, would be kept at the establishment as long as possible. Sometimes, when meeting the facility’s production target depends on the number of convicts in the shift, the administration may resort to hampering parole on a mass scale. We came across such practices even at penal institutions for young girls. These situations were perceived by minor convicts as crying unfairness, ultimately undermining their belief in a just world, already deficient due to hard turns in their lives. To draw a bottom line, it can be stated with assurance that involvement of colonies’ administrations in the above listed actions in the capacity of core players causes irreparable damage to the idea of a humane penal system. In our opinion, the administration should have only an advisory voice in such matters — the decision itself must be made by a court of law, and the right to file an application with a court of law should go to the convicts without intermediaries, as well as full legal responsibility for any violations of relevant obligations assumed by the convict. Only then these measures can become workable. MOTHERHOOD Loss of parental rights, the rights of a mother, is a major issue in female penitentiaries, if not the principal one. And, possibly, here lies one of the main differences between the female convict and the male convict. For a mother, whether she is a criminal or not, the very thought that her children are growing far away, where she cannot see them, cannot help them at a moment of difficulty, is absolutely unbearable. 80% of convicted women are mothers. The average prison sentence in Russia is 5.5 years. This a long time away, during which even very little children grow up. A small percentage of women, about 1%, get pregnant in jail and become mothers behind the bars. One would think that they are lucky to have their child at their side. But this is not so. As long as the mother is in a pretrial detention facility, she has the baby with her, but as soon as she is moved to a colony, the baby is taken away from her and put into the so-called “home of mother and child,” in fact an orphanage, which mothers can visit for a couple of hours a day. This practice is monstrous and, to emphasize, it is absolutely unlawful. Part 1, Article 100 of the RF Criminal Implementation Code that regulates “particularities of supplies for convicted pregnant women, convicted breast-feeding mothers, and convicted women who have children” reads, “convicted women may put their children aged up to three years into child homes at penal institutions, see them outside of the working hours without restrictions. They may be permitted to live together with their children.” In other words, the law does not prohibit a convict mother and her child living together. However, only one colony out of ten that have a child’s home on their premises, initiated “an experiment of living together” in the summer of 2002. This required about 20 000 US dollars (a grant from a humanitarian foundation and, importantly, a very special head of the child’s home, a pediatrician, almost the only one in the system who can see a difference between the needs of the jail and the needs of the child and appreciates that no normal development of a child is possible without a mother. On bright side, there already is at least one colony where mothers live with their children. On the dark side, the other nine colonies will passively wait for funds and the experiment’s outcome, and will not make even a single step to ease the fate of the children they are entrusted with. Also, as a rule, the workers of the establishments engaged in the care after the prisoners’ infants are convinced that convict mothers do not deserve to be called mothers and should not be cared about. Again, this phenomenon involves not only moral issues, but purely legal issues as well. Depriving a mother of the right to care after her child without formally stripping her of parental rights constitutes a grave violation of both domestic and international law. Part 1, Article 9 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child reads: Member states shall ensure that no child is separated from his or her parents against their will, with the exception of cases where competent authorities, in accordance with a court ruling, determine according to the applicable law and procedure that such separation is needed in the child’s best interest. A few words about Polish experience of addressing this problem. Until the end of 70s, Poland treated mothers in penitentiaries in a way similar to Russia. But in 1978, a group of people in Poland raised their voices in defense of the rights of the child and put the problem of keeping mothers and children in jails at the focus of public attention. After heated discussions in the press and in the government, during which jail workers gave all the usual arguments against a reform, the issue was resolved in the best interests of the child. Accidentally, the refurbishing of the child’s homes to accommodate the mothers was minimal. Poland is not a very rich country, but Poland made it possible not to separate the mother and the child until the child reaches the age of three. (1) A child may stay at the nursery longer if the remaining portion of the mother’s sentence is less than a year. (2) Instead of the 25% that other prisoners receive. (3) I. Foynitsky, “The Female Criminal.” Severniy Vestnik (St. Petersburg: 1883). (4) Ya. Ghilinsky, Criminology. A Series of Lectures (St. Petersburg: 2002). (5) E.g.,, see: P. Tarnovskaya, Female Murderers (St. Petersburg: 1902): “Among peasants, murdering of husbands is a particularly clear manifestation of spouse inequality. If a man sees his wife as a burden, he keeps her as a real slave, in the same manner he keeps working horses, does not shy away from having relations with another woman, at times in the same home where he lives with the wife. In other cases, a man may leave his wife he is bored with and go in search for a fortune into the capital city. A wife tired of her husband can do nothing of the sort. If she is unfaithful to him, he will beat her up atrociously or even kill her; if she leaves him, he can always have her sent back to him forcibly. Of the two spouses, it is only the wife who is required by law to live together with her husband volens nolens, while the husband may do whatever he pleases in the event there is no harmony in his family life. This inequality of the spouses’ rights is at the root of greater occurrence of husband killings as compared to murders of wives.” Also see: P. Tarnovskaya, “Female Crime and Early Marriages.” Severny Vestnik (St. Petersburg: 1904): “For the young mother, a child is an obstacle in getting a job. But you have to struggle for dear life, and the voice of conscience often sinks in the sense of self-preservation.” (6) Performance Report for 2001 by the Ombudsman of the Russian Federation (Moscow, Yurisprudentsia, 2002). (7) In his book Spouse Killing as a Social Phenomenon (St. Petersburg: 1992), D. Shestakov reports the following data, "if in 1989 the number of murders and attempted murders was 21 500 cases, then it can be assumed that murders of family members numbered at least 7 000 cases, and the number of spouse murders was at least 4 000." (8) "Zone" — prison jargon for penal colony. (9) "Autozak" — a truck converted into a prisoner transportation vehicle. (10) "Stolypin" — train cars used for transportation of prisoners, with the windows barred. (11) L. Alpern, Only One Tenth: Notes of a Prison Visitor (Moscow: Center for Assistance to Criminal Justice Reform, 2000). (12) L. Alpern, A. Antonov et al., Prisons Are Not for Women: Monitoring Findings, Essays, Interviews on the Situation of Women in Russia’s Institutions of Confinement (Moscow: Center for Assistance to Criminal Justice Reform:, 2000). (13) Article 116 of UIK. (14) See the Section “Punishment Ward.” (15) A. Potyomkina, Convicted Women in Colonies: Materials of a Special Census of 1994 (Moscow: National Research Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, 1997). Back |
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