THE OUTCASTS

an interview by Nadezhda Azhgikhina

A Return to Normal Life is Possible for Those Serving Under Three Years in Prison -- an interview by Nadezhda Azhgikhina Larisa Shevchenko is a police lieutenant-colonel, has a degree in psychology, teaches in Kharkov at the University of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, and is one of a very few specialists in the entire Confederation of Independent States (former Soviet Union -- editor) on the psychology of women criminals.

-- Larisa Aleksandrovna, why did you decide to make this particular area the focus of your scholarly work?

-- I was l8 when I first went to a women's prison camp as part of my on-site training. It was a gray day, pouring rain, and on a bench inside the gray walls sat women in black padded jackets, their whole demeanor bristling, and even the air there was different, heavy. Right off I decided never to work in such a place. But fate decided otherwise and later it was precisely here that I came to work. For seventeen years I worked in this prison camp where first-time offenders serve their sentences for both small and very severe crimes. At a certain point I began to feel a lack of knowledge, of a scientific basis for my work, and I continued my education. After getting a diploma in law, I got one in psychology and started to do research. Unfortunately there is very little literature in our country on women prisoners -- mostly it's about male crime and law-breaking by minors. It is as if women don't exist. Yet prison workers know that women's crime has its own dynamics, that while all crime has its origins in the same factors, social ones, the circumstances in which it is committed and the attitudes of men and women to it do differ. Women pay a heavy price for what they've done and they do not commit severe crimes twice. No more than 40% of women's crimes are committed in a drunken state, while for men it is two thirds. Whereas men's sense of guilt gets blunted by the end of their prison terms, for women it is the reverse. And finally, I should say that women more often die when emprisoned.

-- How does women's crime differ from men's?

-- Overall, the most common widespread crime in Ukraine is theft, which is more than one third of crimes, and this is true for the other countries in the Confederation. Murder's share is growing, of late it has gone from 7-l2%. Women sometimes commit especially cruel and clever crimes. One viewpoint, and it is held by the well known criminologist, Mikhail Vnukov, is that women's physical weakness encourages this tendency to seek special methods and devices for commiting crime. Another significant group are the women drug addicts -- their percentage of the whole is larger than for men. This has to do with the female organism being more vulnerable to chemicals. In our country you don't go to prison for taking drugs but for the accompanying crimes. Often women steal to support their daily and ever growing drug dose. In general, one can say they steal to get drugs and alcohol and not to get things needed for basic normal life. Very seldom, in less that 4% of cases, is it theft in order to feed her child. Still another category is stealing state property on a very large scale. These women get long sentences, and right now they are the ones serving out their full terms. Also here are a few former chief accountants from stock companies, not many, because the owners of those companies understand that an accountant, even one who has stolen, is more useful not in prison but on the job where the losses can be compensated for and her guilt redeemed.

-- Can you sketch a profile of the typical prisoner?

-- No. Each category has its distinctive traits and age range. Murder is usually committed by women from 40-50 years old -- they are more than 70% of all women murderers. The overwhelming majority are those who long endured beatings and scornful remarks from their life partners. If the crime involves killing the family father, then the children become co-participants. The tragedy is that women in the family are in practice defenseless against violence. She has nowhere to go for help. She can't expect it from the local policeman -- he usually takes a passive position, saying, you both sort it out at home. In all my working years I have always been dealing with such cases of everyday violence. The wives of drunken husbands are truly the great martyrs. And when their patience wears out, the irreparable happens Sometimes it's a question of who will kill whom first. I have to say, murderers are amazing people. They try clearly to delineate their living space and to let into it as few people as possible. They never have a close friend with whom to sit and share a tin of food. They assidusously look after their health, they're always going to the prison clinic. They dream of their victims, almost all of them cry out at night, that someone is rejecting them or someone is talking them into doing something. In the daytime they work well, they try to master all the different kinds of training available in the camp. Women thiefs are totally different. They fall into two age groups. There are the under 25, so-called "department store types," who are strong and daring and very professional in their business. Their main trait is adaptability. They want to look and think like everyone else. The other age group consists of women over 50. As a rule they worked in the clothing markets where lots of people congregate. All thieves have a heightened sense of alarm and a well developed memory. There was one girl here who specialized in theft from automat storage boxes. Four years after her trial, she related some twenty episodes, remembering the numbers of the boxes, what was inside them and where she had stashed away the stolen things. Women thieves are very influenced by the criminal subculture and the example of relatives who steal. They are people of temperament. Women addicts are incredibly demonstrative. Their behavior and even their cosmetics are not like others. They are sensitive to the attitudes of those around them, they know whom they can manipulate to pity their sad fate. We used to get women addicts who had finished high school, but now it's those who dropped out at age l4 or even at l3, as soon as they developed a taste for drugs. The average level of education for women in the camp has dropped by three school years, and for men it is one to two years. Alas, the single-drug and the multiple-drug addicts are thrown together here, and they go through their own sort of camp "university." As a rule the addicts are young-- I recall only one who did it for over l0 years, with interruptions. When released, they almost always die from overdosing and seldom reach the age of 35. Embezzlers are respectable women whose portraits once hung on the "honor wall' [in Soviet times, every enterprise had on display a public honor roll of its best workers -- editor]. They are visited by former colleagues and their enterprises help support these women's families while they are in prison. The sums they embezzled look ridiculous by today's standards.

-- Does it often happen that women are leaders of criminal gangs?

-- If a woman is at the head, the gang works twice as effectively. Women are more thorough in cleaning the apartment, in making borsch, and in preparing a crime. Quite often women head up mixed groups of both men and women in swindling. Some clever ones figured out how to re-sell twice or thrice a non-existent house or a car that the buyer saw only once on some lot. The preparation involved here is masterful and these women usually have good "public credentials." It's hard to catch them. Recently they caught a group that robbed apartments -- the one who worked as the scout was a well known figure skater holding the title of :Master of Sports." She went to apartments in the guise of peddling pension plans. The group was uncovered quite by accident.

-- What in your view is really needed to help women prisoners?

-- First of all, to organize a system of rehabilitation. The specialists know, and it's the experience of many generations of prison workers, that if a women "sits" for two to three years, she can still be rescued and returned to society, to her family and children. It is pointless to emprison her for more than three years. She will then be lost to society, her children will lose their mother. Three years is a long enough time, because a sense of guilt will stay with her for the rest of her life. No court could punish her more severely than she does herself.

-- Do your own children also want to go into the law?

-- My son graduated from a juridical college and will be a fourth generation lawyer in the family. My daughter when very young wanted to be a judge. I would work through Saturdays and Sundays, leaving her outside the camp zone with acqaintances in the court, and she remembered the beautiful women judges who were respected by everyone. Now I am not sure -- we'll wait and see how she develops.