About the prison scandal in Georgia

“We have people in prison for almost nothing: Saakashvili declared “zero tolerance” for all crimes, a 15-year-old child stole lobio, he was hungry, you know, he stole beans to eat and received a year in prison, and then this ! - this phrase contains the whole essence of the “torture case” for Georgian society.

During the years of the neoliberal regime, the prison in Georgia has become a truly “people's” institution. According to the Center for Human Rights, in this country there are 539 prisoners for every 100 thousand inhabitants . This is one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world. For this reason, what is happening in prisons cannot leave Georgians indifferent. After all, everyone has friends or relatives languishing in the Georgian Gulag.

The reason for the transformation of a paradise country on the Black Sea into a branch of Kolyma is quite simple. This is a combination of extreme poverty of the population with unprecedentedly cruel punishments.

Russian journalist Dmitry Zhvania, who recently visited Tbilisi, writes:

“Unemployment in Georgia has become total. Despite the fact that there are no accurate statistics on unemployment in the country, everyone is well aware of the scale it has assumed under the current government,” Alexander Shalamberidze, a representative of the Union of Unemployed for Employment, told Novosti-Georgia exactly a year ago. According to the deputy, “the merit of the president is that the country’s population is not able to buy even Chinese onions for 9 lari, Turkish tomatoes for 5 lari and Armenian cabbage for 2 lari, and bread, which has become the only food product for many, is becoming increasingly scarce every day. is getting more expensive." According to the opposition deputy, unemployment in the country reached 40%, Georgia's external debt exceeded $4 billion, the cost of living reached 150 lari, and inflation exceeded 12%. I would like to note that the cost of living indicated by Gia Tsigareishvili is 50 lari higher than the Georgian pension, which is 100 lari (1 lari = $ 1.6 or 20 rubles).”

Poverty leads to an increase in crime, but then the incorruptible and ruthless Georgian police come into action, after which the country's prisons are filled with free labor. After all, the only thing worse than tyranny is incorruptible tyranny. In Russia, as is known, the idiocy of laws is mitigated by the optionality of their implementation. In Georgia, the law punishes beggars with ferocious inevitability for the stolen “three ears of corn.” All this is reminiscent of Great Britain at the beginning of the “golden age of liberalism,” where theft of a hat was punishable by nine years of hard labor in Australia and children were hanged for a stolen piece of bread. But the regime in Tbilisi does not hide the fact that it is building a liberal utopia.

This is the neoliberal paradise that is being imposed on us as a model. Potemkin villages for a handful of capitalists, officials and the “creative” hipsters who serve them, and poverty with slave labor for the majority of the people.