The end of punitive medicine?

It seems that the medical service of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia is finally being transferred to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health. If this happens, and I am inclined to trust the information that has appeared to me, there is faith that the number of deaths on the other side of the barbed wire will nevertheless decrease.

There is an opinion that criminals must “suffer” and the lack of normal medical care is, as it were, an additional punishment. But this situation already resembles concentration camps and the Gulag, and the next stage can only be gas chambers.

But what about those people who are under investigation, that is, they are not yet criminals? Do they also receive additional punishment? For what?

During the years spent in Butyrskaya prison, I forever remembered “Dr. Mengele” - the then deputy head of the pre-trial detention center for the medical unit, Lieutenant Colonel Kratov, and now a defendant in the criminal case in connection with the death of Sergei Magnitsky. He was known for sending people to a punishment cell without a medical examination, and treating heart attacks and colds with the same pill. At the same time he divided it into two parts.

This is prison medicine, not only in the Butyrsky Central, but throughout Russia. Hundreds of prisoners die in prison every year. In just four months of this year, 13 people died in pre-trial detention centers in Moscow. The scary thing is that the medical service in prisons is absolutely independent of the Ministry of Health. That is, healthcare is separate, and the health status of almost a million people in custody is separate . Maybe now a serious element of influence on prisoners - prison medicine - will finally fall out of the justice machine?