Punishment as a crime. Why Russia's penitentiary system is to blame for recent inmate riots
At the same time, the operational service is being burdened with more and more responsibilities that are irrelevant or even detrimental to its core function. At pretrial detention centers, its officers are supposed to help investigators push the “villain” to confess and possibly incriminate others. Sometimes, deadlocked investigations are resolved with the help of informants, or through forms of pressure that can include a deliberate, illegal, and unjustified deterioration of detention conditions. Such violations turn operations officers themselves into criminals before they even start to engage in truly corrupt practices.
In penal colonies, operations officers are tasked with solving crimes and obtaining confessions from convicts, which makes up the largest part of operative work and reporting. The war and recruitment of prisoners into the armed forces have created an additional burden, as the operational service also has to make sure the front gets as many new soldiers as the higher-ups demand. Pressuring convicts into signing military service contracts has become another objective of the operational service.
Special control must also be established over Ukrainian prisoners of war, some of whom are being held in Rostov's SIZO-1, for instance — in violation of international law. Naturally, this kind of control also falls under the purview of operative work. And of course, officers are also busy fabricating new justifications for terrorism cases against political prisoners already serving time, such as mathematician Azat Miftakhov, municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov, and blogger Vladislav Sinitsa.
As a result, operative officers have neither the time nor the energy to monitor the state of mind of each individual prisoner. Meanwhile, overlooking someone who might cause trouble is unacceptable. To avoid such negligence, the Russian penitentiary system employs preventive control — but only in theory.
A simulacrum of prevention
Initially, preventive control was not conceived of as an additional punishment. Creating a dedicated register of prisoners who are prone to drug use, escape attempts, suicide, or disseminating terrorist and extremist ideas is an efficient way of separating those who need special control from the rest of the prison population. Such individuals require the supervision of narcologists and psychologists (if the colony has any), observation of their whereabouts (for inmates with a history of escape attempts), and other preventive measures stipulated by the 72nd Prevention Guide of the Ministry of Justice. According to the guide, inmates are placed on the register based on information that they might be plotting something dangerous. In practice, however, the procedure has degenerated into what is called “charges-based” control.
In other words, an inmate accused of drug possession is automatically labeled as “prone to drug use” — even before they are sentenced — and individuals arrested after being on the wanted list are recognized as “prone to escape.” However, the most dangerous mishap occurred with convicts and defendants labeled as “terrorists” or “extremists.”
This register initially included those convicted of committing or attempting to commit terrorist acts, some of whom proclaimed their affiliation with ISIS. In recent years, however, the list has been expanded to include civil activists, politicians, poets, filmmakers, and bloggers imprisoned on the same charges of “terrorism” and “extremism.”