Prison
There are 750 penitentiary institutions (labour settlements), 61 pedagogical colonies (for juvenile offenders), 13 prisons, and 174 jails in 1997 (Zubkov, Kalinin, Sysoev, 1998: 81).
The imprisonment rate per 100,000 population (Table 10) in Russia is the highest in the world (more than 720-730 in 1999, excluding institutions of military justice (Abramkin, 1998; Barclay, Tavares, 2003; Christie, 2000; Conditions of convicts in contemporary Russia, 2003; Walmsley, 2003). One in four adult men in Russia is a former prisoner. The overwhelming portion of the prisoners are not professional criminals, but people who found themselves in prison because they had been in a position of misery, unemployment, and homeless. The conditions in penitentiary institutions are terrible (Abramkin, 1998; Gilinskiy, 1998). Extremely harsh regimes in institutions leading to the deprivation of freedom suffered by those awaiting trial or under conditional sentence, contravene human rights, such as overcrowding in the pre-trial detention centers; compelling inmates to sleep in shifts; bad food; the spread of tuberculosis; torture of those awaiting trial, and under investigation in the «press cells»[506] to procure confessions of guilt; and mass beatings. Life in institution for the deprivation of freedom (prisons and correctional colonies) is unbearable, and the possibilities for «correction» are nil. The correctional outcome is quite the reverse.
Thousands of prisoners die every year from hunger, tuberculosis, and suffocating from the lack of oxygen in overcrowded cells in pre-trial detention centers. More than 2,300 people wich HIV infections, and more than 92 thousands people with tuberculosis were in Russian penitentiary institutions in 1999 The situation in penitentiary institutions has slowly improved after the transfer from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Justice.
Table 10. Prison population in Russia (1989-2001)
Source: Barklay G. & Tavares C, 2003: 22
