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Struck 23 times for a missing button
Why inmates at a juvenile prison outside Moscow rioted last month
Before dawn on February 22, there was a riot at a juvenile prison in Mozhaysk, outside Moscow. According to investigators, the inmates locked themselves in and started tearing the facility apart, burning and throwing objects out windows, while destroying furniture and doors. The news agency Mediazona, which monitors Russia's prisons and criminal justice system, studied what the youths themselves have said about this riot.
Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service has always presented the Mozhaysk correctional penal colony as something “exemplary,” but observers from the government's Public Oversight Commission say the prison operates in an atmosphere of fear. In the early morning hours of February 22, fifty-five of the facility's 75 prisoners took part in a riot.
According to the Federal Penitentiary Service, the reason for the riot was the prison's refusal to release one of the inmates on parole. Investigators, meanwhile, say the prisoners were trying to pressure the warden into expanding their smoking rights and access to mobile telephones.
Judging by 23 statements submitted to human rights monitors by the inmates themselves, the true reason for the riot could be the prison's own rough handling of prisoners, including regular beatings and abuse. According to inmates, they're subjected to such treatment from the moment they arrive. Prison guards hold their heads in toilets, beat them, force them to goosestep while hitting them with rubber clubs, and make them eat any drawings, poems, and even matches found during bunk inspections.
Just as in many of Russia's adult prisons, the slightest disorderly behavior is sometimes punished with violence. The number of times an inmate might be struck for a particular offense, moreover, isn't determined by the nature of his infraction, but the whim of the guards. For example, one inmate says a prisoner was hit 23 times for appearing in a uniform that was missing a button. The guard said it was because it happened on February 23.
You don't even have to break the rules to get clubbed at Mozhaysk's prison, according to some inmates. Ivan Kuchin, a 16-year-old prisoner, says a guard regularly smacks him across the face without any reason and repeats, “How's it going, Ivan, my buddy?”
According to inmates, Denis Davydov, who works at the prison, forces them to memorize poems. Anyone who fails to recite them correctly is beaten. (Most of all, Davydov enjoys a poem written by Alexander Pushkin, dedicated to the 19th century Russian soldier-poet Denis Vasilyevich Davydov, the guard's namesake.)
On March 11, the local branch of Russia's Investigative Committee opened a criminal case into the prison riot. The inmates under investigation in this case could be locked up for another 3-8 years, if convicted.
“I was just walking out of church, after praying, and [Vladimir Nikolayevich] called me over again. He asked me why I hadn't come to him and showed him the sewn button. I told him that he'd never told me to come over, and I said I'd been at church. Then he grabbed his club and said, ‘[After church,] you come to me, and I'll deal with you,’ and he struck me five times,” the teenager says.