Gender, Geography, and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia 0199658617, 9780199658619

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GENDER, GEOGRAPHY, AND PUNISHMENT

ALSO PUBLISHED BY OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS IN THE OXFORD GEOGRAPHICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES SERIES Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest Thomas W. Whitmore and B. L. Turner II Worlds of Food Place, Power, and Provenance in the Food Chain Kevin Morgan, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch The Nature of the State Excavating the Political Ecologies of the Modern State Mark Whitehead, Rhys Jones, and Martin Jones Decolonizing the Colonial City Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica Colin Clarke Industrial Transformation in the Developing World Michael T. Rock and David P. Angel The Globalized City Economic Restructuring and Social Polarization in European Cities Edited by Frank Moulaert, Arantxa Rodriguez, and Erik Swyngedouw Conflict, Consensus, and Rationality in Environmental Planning An Institutional Discourse Approach Yvonne Rydin Globalization and Urban Change Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-Projects Kris Olds Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes William M. Denevan Poliomyelitis A World Geography: Emergence to Eradication Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew Cliff War Epidemics An Historical Geography of Infectious Diseases in Military Conflict and Civil Strife, 1850–2000 Matthew Smallman-Raynor and Andrew Cliff Social Power and the Urbanization of Water Flows of Power Erik Swyngedouw Russia’s Unknown Agriculture Household Production in Post-Socialist Rural Russia Judith Pallot and Tat’yana Nefedova

Gender, Geography, and Punishment The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia Judith Pallot and Laura Piacentini With the assistance of Dominique Moran

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Judith Pallot and Laura Piacentini 2012 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First published 2012 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978-0-19-965861-9 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

CONTENTS Acknowledgements List of Figures List of Tables

1. The Archipelago and the Matrioshka 2. Researching Women’s Carceral Experience in Russia

vii x xi 1 19

PART I Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

3. The Historical Geography of Punitive Expulsion

47

4. Correctional Colonies in their Local Setting

73

5. ‘Socialism in One Barracks’

96

PART II Women Prisoners’ Experiences

of Carceral Russia 6. Remand: The First Phase of Coerced Mobilization

121

7. Etap and Quarantine: The Second Phase of Coerced Mobilization

139

8. Staying in Touch with the World Beyond the Colony Fences

158

9. Long-distance Motherhood

180

10. Social Relationships Behind the Colony Fences

197

11. Rehabilitation as Emotion Therapy

218

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Contents

12. Re-Socialization and the Construction of Gender Identities

236

13. Epilogue

256

Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3

261 263 265 267 281

References Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research for this book was not straightforward and that we have been able to bring it to fruition is thanks to the help and support given us by many people. Everyone we name below is aware of our difficulties with the Russian penal authorities so we do not need to rehearse these again here. Indeed, we should apologize to colleagues and friends for subjecting them to what must have become extremely tedious and over-long expositions on the latest twists and turns of our dealings with different levels of the Russian prison bureaucracy. We are particularly grateful that the Economic and Social Research Council was prepared to take the risk of funding the initial project and then, when things ran into trouble, did not withdraw its support but, rather, went out of its way to encourage us to come up with new ideas on how to realize some of our original aims. We have, thanks to this support, been able to amass an enormous amount of material of which we present just a small fraction in the pages that follow. Throughout 2008, Judith was in regular touch with Lyndy Griffin, Research Development Manager, who received her updates on the latest developments with sympathy and patience, and with Brian Hooper, Finance Director, who we always expected to ask for some money back but never did. Various other people in official positions helped us along the way, writing letters and making representations to the Russian authorities. We are particularly grateful to John Hood, then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, for making representations on our behalf to the Russian Ministry of Justice in the most vigorous terms, and to Elizabeth Teague in the FCO and Sir Andrew Coyle, both of whom gave valuable advice on how best to proceed. Especially large thanks are due to Mary McAuley, ever the friend, who, whilst wading in on our behalf with her contacts in the Russian Penal Service to excellent effect, also let us know when we were over-obsessing about being hard done by, gently suggesting that we get on with the work at hand. There are many Russians who need to be thanked for their hard work for the project. ‘Region’, under the leadership of Lena Omel’chenko, is a professional group of scholars that set about the task of taking interviews with enthusiasm, efficiency, and sensitivity. We are extremely grateful to everyone who was involved, but especially to Lena, Guzel’, and Natasha who did the bulk of interviews for us. We are also grateful to Alla Pokras, from the NGO Penal Reform International,

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who, with infinite patience and care, answered our questions about the finer points of the latest circular from FSIN and who, drawing on her experiences of helping women prisoners, provided us with rich information about women’s penal colonies. And we are also grateful to Natasha Dziadko of the Moscow Centre for Penal Reform who, latterly, also proved to be a fount of information. We are full of admiration for the work that these NGOs do to improve the lot of women and girls incarcerated in Russia today. The ‘Memorial’ Society is well known in the West for its work recording the history of the Gulag and we are grateful for the access it gave us to materials relating to the past geography of the Russian penal system. The production of these data as maps is due to the efforts of Sonya Gavrilova, expert in GIS, who also created the maps for the website gulagmaps.org that was a spin-off of the research for this book. Igor Sutyagin, now living in Oxford, was also a source of valuable insights based on his personal experience of Russian penal colonies and we are grateful to him for sharing these with us. Our respective universities have supported our research for this book. Laura would like to thank Strathclyde Law School for providing research leave in Spring 2010, which enabled her to translate and analyse interview transcripts, and she would also like to thank the Law School at Queen’s University Belfast for being generous hosts during that period. Thanks also to the University of Oxford and Christ Church for two terms’ leave which Judith needed for the writing up in 2011. Various people in the School of Geography and Environment, the University of Oxford have been closely involved in supporting the research on which this book is based. Richard Holden has taken care of money matters, always responding to Judith’s ever more extraordinary requests about who to pay and how, with good humour and creativity, as well as rectitude. Thanks to Ailsa Allen for doing her usual excellent job on the illustrations and for not even raising an eyebrow at the unreasonable deadlines and the need to master different transliteration schemes. Elena Katz provided help in analysing articles concerning women in Russian legal journals and work on the interview transcripts. Jacky Webber at Christ Church brought the final manuscript into order, for which thanks are also due. Finally, we have to thank Dominique Moran who originally was to be a coauthor of this book but who was forced to withdraw for personal reasons. Her contribution, especially in the early stages of planning the book, was invaluable. More difficult is how we should acknowledge the input of our original partners in the Academy of Law and Penal Management in Riazan’. Until Riazan’ withdrew from the project, and over a period of two years, Judith was in almost weekly contact with the Academy. We never had any reason to doubt the commitment of our opposite numbers to the project and we believe that their regret at the ending of the collaboration would have been sincere had they been able to express it. From the Riazan’ team we should like to note the contribution, in particular, of ColonelsTamara Schmaeva and Svetlana Gousseva. This book is a culmination of our joint interest in carceral geography and we have found the engagement with each other’s discipline (human geography and prison sociology) a fascinating and intellectually enriching experience. Inevitably,

Acknowledgements

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there has been a division of labour in presenting the results of our research in this book. The two authors took the lead on different chapters, although all were the product of joint discussion and drafting. Judith was responsible for Chapters 2–5 and 8–10, and Laura for Chapters 6, 7, 11, and 12. The introduction and conclusion were written together. As Judith was putting the final touches to the manuscript, Laura was producing a baby; and so any mistakes in the final version lie at the former’s door. Our families have had to show a particular degree of patience during the gestation of this book and we should like to thank Arlo and Robert, the aforementioned baby and his father, and Jeremy and Julia for giving us the time and space to write this book. Judith Pallot, Oxford Laura Piacentini, Strathclyde

LIST OF FIGURES 3.1 The distribution of prisoners by regions of the Russian Republic (RSFSR) for a single average year between 1949 and 1953 3.2 The distribution of labour camp headquarters in 1959–60 in the Russian Republic (RSFSR) 3.3 The distribution of all types of correctional facilities in Perm’ krai, 2008 3.4 The distribution of adult and juvenile colonies for women in the Russian Federation, 2011 3.5 Map showing the place of residence or arrest of women in L’govo juvenile colony, 2006 3.6 Map showing the place of former residence of women in correctional colonies (IK2 and IK14) in the Republic of Mordoviia, 2007 4.1. Temlag, Mordoviia, in the 1930s showing the forest sections worked by forced labour 4.2 Schematic representation of the boundaries enclosing penal facilities in a hypothetical rural region 4.3 The penal zone in Zubovo-Polianskii raion in the Federal Republic of Mordoviia 5.1 Model plan of the zonation of a juvenile colony (centre) 5.2 Simplified diagram of the internal departments of a correctional colony 5.3 Schematic diagram of self-organization collectives in a detachment (otriad) in a correctional colony 7.1. The transportation routes taken from the remand prison to colony for a selection of juvenile offenders held in L’govo VK (educational colony) Riazan’ in 2006 7.2. The transportation routes taken from the remand prison to Ivanovo colony for two adult offenders

52 53 58 60 62 63 76 80 81 102 107 109

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LIST OF TABLES 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 6.1 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 10.1 10.2 10.3 11.1 12.1 12.2 12.3

Characteristics of the current women prisoners and former prisoners interviewed for the research project (compared with FSIN 2009 census population) Formal classification of penal facilities administered by FSIN in the Russian Federation, 2011 The place of incarceration of different categories of prisoner in relation to where they were previously domiciled or stood trial, 1989–2009 Arrival of the first family member of households of respondents to the 2007 survey of zone inhabitants The pattern of employment in the ‘zone’ of residents of non-zone villages in Zubovo-Polianskii rural district The attitudes of people living in different settlements in Zubovo-Polianskii raion to joint zone/district social and cultural activities The attitudes of people living in different settlements in Zubovo-Polianskii raion towards the hypothetical closure of the correctional colonies A model timetable for the allocation of prisoners’ time in a standard regime colony The length of time taken to bring the cases of women on remand to court, according to the 2009 FSIN census of prisoners The length of time that it took adult women and men to be transported to correctional colonies, according to the 1999 FSIN census of prisoners The responses of offenders in Novyi Oskol juvenile colony to questions about adaptation and the colony as home The external connections of convicted prisoners: telephone calls The external connections of convicted prisoners: parcels The external connections of convicted prisoners: visits Compliance and resistance among men and women prisoners according to the 2009 FSIN census Trust in men’s correctional colonies The people to whom prisoners would turn if they needed help, according to Mordoviia survey results The participation of women incarcerated in Mordoviia in work and formal education, 2007 Religion and adaptation in women’s correctional colonies The principal anxieties about release among adult women and juveniles in IK2 and IK14, Mordoviia, and in Novyi Oskol educational colony Adult and juvenile women prisoners’ immediate plans after release

34 56 61 88 88 90 91 104 127 143 160 166 167 167 199 214 215 222 241 252 252

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1 The Archipelago and the Matrioshka We begin by comparing two women’s descriptions of their transportation to prison. Sometime later they rudely woke us at night and ordered us to ready ourselves for departure. They put us in vans with the logo ‘bread’, literally jammed us in, so we could hardly breathe. The van began to move. The air became so stifling that several women fainted . . . The van stopped and we were put on cattle carts outfitted with plank beds. Soon the train started. We were given herring and bread, and a bucket of water. The trip was exhausting and we lost count of the passing days. Nobody knew where we were being taken. At last on dawn of one day the train stopped and we were taken out. The station sign said Pot’ma, so it was in the Mordovian republic . . . What a picture it was! (Liudmila, 1937)1 We didn’t know where we were going. We were herded into these cells to wait for the convoy to arrive and collect the matrioshki. They took us to the station; it was cold, winter, and we were left in these black cars (voronki) in the freezing cold, waiting two hours for the train. Then the train came; first they took one load, then another—men, and then the women. There was a four-person compartment but they put ten of us in along with our cases. We travelled like that on top of one another the whole way. Some young girls who were travelling with us went further; we were all together even though they were juveniles . . . HIVinfected and tuberculosis-infected should have travelled separately but we were all in together . . . we were only allowed to go to the toilet every twelve hours. They gave us prison rations—a jar of dried potatoes and a jar of oats but no hot water . . . it was a nightmare . . . And the guard was some young man and he told us we had to entertain him, tell him jokes. It was just awful . . . so demeaning . . . (Soniia, 2001)2

The first quotation is taken from the memoir of Liudmila Ivanovna Granovskaia, arrested in 1937 and transported from Kresti prison in Leningrad to Mordoviia to serve a five-year sentence; and the second is from a woman prisoner, we shall call her Soniia, who was transported much more recently, in 2001, from the ‘Bastille’ in Moscow also to Mordoviia to serve an eight-year sentence. The circumstances of these women were different: Liudmila was a political prisoner, arrested for being the wife of an enemy of the people, whilst Soniia was sentenced for drug dealing. More importantly, the context and conditions of punishment were different in the 1930s from today: Liudmila Ivanovna was not protected by Russia’s signature on the European Convention on Human Rights or by the various

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protective clauses in the Russian Federation’s criminal correction code.3 After her release she was not allowed to return home but was exiled in northern Russia. Soniia, on the other hand, benefiting from an amnesty introduced to relieve prison overcrowding in the early 2000s that reduced all women’s sentences by one year, was allowed to return home in 2008, there to await her husband’s eventual release from his twelve-and-a-half-year sentence, also for drug dealing. Yet, as far as the prison transport was concerned, the experiences of the two women were not so very different; neither knew precisely where she was going nor how long it would take, the journey was uncomfortable, food and drink scarce and the train journey terminated in the same place, a long way from home. In short, for both women the experience of the transportation was punitive. Michel Foucault, to whom we shall have occasion to return at various points in this book, would argue that this was its precise intent: the ‘cell-carriage’ is part of the panoptic process that alters the behaviour of those deemed to offend against society’s norms.4 Even short journeys to the penitentiary were supposed by Benthamite penal reformers to create a space for prisoners to reflect upon and regret their actions, so that they emerged from ‘the terrible torture’ of the journey transformed. Liudmila tells of how the women with her lost their sense of shame, and Soniia of how she felt demeaned by the young guard’s attitude. But there are hints of other ‘transformations’ in their narratives: the transport exposed Soniia to the possibility of contracting tuberculosis—the scourge of Russian prisons today—and Liudmila’s journey undermined the health of her travelling companions. For both women, the journey was confirmation of a loss of agency. Their previous selves were changed through the trajectory of penal transformation. From now on their lives were going to be lived en masse in the communal dormitories of the barracks in correctional colonies that have remained the building block of Russian penal architecture for over a century.

Russia’s penal archipelago Liudmila and Soniia’s experiences are one example of what we argue in this book is the use of geography as punishment. We will be giving many more examples in the chapters that follow of how geography is experienced punitively and unevenly by prisoners in Russia today. The example we have given above of two women experiencing a similar journey six decades apart also serves as an illustration of the importance of history in analysing Russian punishment and this will be a recurring theme in this book. The need for long transportations for both Soniia and Liudmila arose from a particular distribution of penal facilities that developed in the early years of the Soviet state, came to fruition in the period of the Stalinist repression when the gulag reached its maximum spatial extent, and matured and put down roots after Stalin’s death. The distribution is characterized by a spatial division of labour between remand facilities, located in the large metropolitan centres, and correctional (formerly, labour) colonies located, by and large, in

The Archipelago and the Matrioshka

3

peripheral locations. In the 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn writing about the gulag captured this geography with the metaphor of the archipelago. Here is how he describes it: And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which though scattered in an archipelago geographically, was fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by zek [convict] people. And this archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into cities, hovering over streets. Yes there were many who did not guess its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been knew the whole truth. (A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1974)5

Despite the fact that since 1991 there have been successive reforms made to the correctional code aimed at bringing conditions in Russia’s prisons in line with international standards, they have not addressed the country’s penal geography. The response from the justice system to the new post-Soviet environment led to a veritable avalanche of progressive penal and legal reforms and yet the practice of sentencing offenders to remote peripheral penal sites continued. As a result, the geographical framework within which punishment takes place in twenty-firstcentury Russia, in broad outline, is the same as it was in the twentieth. As we will show in the chapters that follow, this geographical patterning is associated with a distinctive disciplinary and punitive order in Russian prisons that elevates the importance of factors such as distance and isolation, enforced collectivism, lack of privacy and the micro-choreography of time and space to an understanding of the issues surrounding prisoners’ experiences of confinement and the problems associated with their re-socialization. But it is not our intention to make a case for ‘geographical determinism’; we are not asserting that lengthy prison transports necessarily have to be a ‘terrible torment’, although we do argue that the transportation has a transformative effect on prisoners psychologically, materially, and in terms of their self-identification. We know these effects are not limited to Russia; jurisdictions such as North America, Canada, and Australia face the same double-bind problem of, on the one hand, ensuring that prisoners are within reach of their families and, on the other, that they are sentenced under legal processes to regimes of appropriate category. The Russian case is, however, exceptional. It is not just a distinctive spatiality that has been inherited from the Soviet era; also inherited have been techniques of punishment and surveillance handed down by penal agents from one generation to the next. The impact of Russia’s penal geography on prisoners is mediated by practices and sensibilities gestated in the crucible of the Stalinist gulag or even earlier (penal servitude (katorga) and exile to distant lands made their appearance in the fifteenth century). This is not to suggest that penal practices of the Federal Service for the Administration of Punishments (Federal’naia Sluzhba Ispolneniia Nakazaniia), hereafter referred to by its acronym FSIN, can or should be compared with those of the Stalinist gulag

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or, indeed, of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and KGB which administered punishment in the USSR after Stalin’s death, but to observe that the shadow of these periods hangs heavily over the present. Not for the Soviet Union a process of truth and reconciliation or the transformation of camps into museums as a warning to future generations of the depths to which a state’s inhumanity to its own citizens can plunge.6 Rather, the camps abandoned after Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin were left to ‘sink into the ground’, were converted to other uses, or they were retained as places of incarceration for future generations of offenders. In the final paragraphs of his history of Stalin’s gulag, Oleg Klevniuk ponders its negative long-term consequences on the development of state institutions, the formation of civil society and respect for the rule of law in Russia. He concludes his book within the following Foucauldian echo: The camps produced a specific culture, mode of living, and even language. The culture carried by the millions of former prisoners and guards was disseminated throughout the country and affected the entire Soviet society. It is especially evident in the remote regions that were colonized almost exclusively by convicts. Thus the gulag spread beyond the barbed wire. Society absorbed the criminal mindset, the reliance on violence and the prison culture. The spread of the gulag was a real problem—as real as the monstrous price paid by millions for the establishment and expansion of Stalinism. (Khlevniuk, 2004)7

Examples of the dissemination of the gulag culture in Russia today include the absorption of camp terminology into everyday Russian speech, the popularity of the ‘prison bards’, and mimicry of prison tattoos. Soniia describes the vehicles in which she and her fellow prisoners were driven to the railway station in Moscow as voronki. The arrival of the ‘chernyi voron’, or black crow, outside an apartment was the signal in the 1930s that the security organs had arrived to make an arrest. This is but one of many examples of gulag allusions that we encountered in the course of research for this book.

Women and the matrioshka ethos This book is about women prisoners, so in addition to taking account of how history has mediated Russia’s penal geography, we must also consider the mediating role of society’s attitudes towards women away from the penal environment. In twentieth-century prison sociology, the glaring omission of women offenders until as recently as 30 years ago has served to reinforce in punishment social and cultural expectations of womanhood. In common with most other penal jurisdictions, the criminal justice system in Russia is gendered: stereotypical views of women’s primary role in society in various ways shape understandings of women’s offending behaviours and of appropriate ways to address them. The history of what was referred to as ‘the woman question’ in the Soviet period makes the reading of the context within which decisions were made with respect to women complicated. The Soviet state was committed to gender equality, and the principle of

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equal rights applied when it came in the 1930s to imprisoning innocent Soviet citizens in order to provide free labour for the state’s development project. Women constituted a sub-set of prisoners in the Stalinist gulag—their numbers ranged between 13 per cent and 30 per cent of the total between the late 1930s and 1953.8 And, consistent with Soviet ideology on the woman question, women were subjected to the same horrors in the camps as men; they had the same rations, endured the same living and work conditions, suffered from the same deficits of clothing to protect them against Siberian winters and unheated barracks, and they were held in the same camps. Yet, it is significant that Liudmila Ivanovna was arrested and imprisoned for her husband’s crimes, thus demonstrating that not all vestiges of the pre-revolutionary construction of women’s gender identity were eradicated in 1917. Her treatment, in fact, continued the time-honoured Russian tradition of women sharing their husbands’ punishments that assumed iconic status in the nineteenth-century selfenforced exile of the wives of the Decembrists—the officer opponents to the accession of Nicholas I. In another historical echo, women relatives of men prisoners can refer to themselves today as ‘Decembrists’ wives’.9 There were other ‘concessions’ to women’s ‘special status’ during the Stalinist repression: under an operational order of 1937 mandating the arrest of wives of the enemies-of-thepeople, pregnant women and nursing mothers were not supposed to be arrested (although they often were), and under a 1940 order women who gave birth in a camp were allowed to keep their babies with them for eighteen months whilst breastfeeding before they were taken from them and placed in a children’s camp or state orphanage. The testimonies of gulag survivors indicate that women were better able to live off the miniscule rations and to maintain higher standards of hygiene than were men, and in mixed labour brigades they were often relieved of the heaviest work. But against these positives they were vulnerable to sexual abuse and they could be traded or bartered by camp guards and leaders of the criminal gangs. In truth, the treatment of women in the gulag reflected the fact that Bolshevism kept women within the framework of a second-class citizenship. As Lynn Attwood’s study of the construction of gender in the USSR has shown, the oftrepeated insistence in the Soviet press of women’s excellence in combining social roles of a ‘successful worker and mother who finds equal fulfilment in both’ did not correspond to the reality of women’s lives, which brought them an excessive workload, loss of femininity, and neglect of their family.10 Already before the collapse of the Soviet Union official discourse on ‘the woman question’ was subtly refocused. Mikhael Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, committed the Soviet state to paying renewed attention to women’s needs arising from their role as mothers and homemakers. This commitment set the tone for the subsequent decades when women came under pressure of heightened expectations to become a major force in the moral revival of the country. For the sake of the nation, women were urged to return to their traditional gender roles of wife and mother, an imperative that was used to justify their ejection from the workplace, a widening gap between women’s and men’s wages, and the unapologetic assertion

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of the traditional gender division of labour in the home. Since 1991, women have found themselves disproportionately vulnerable to cutbacks in social programmes that during the Soviet period assisted families and children, with single women being particularly hard hit. Meanwhile, violence against women has been on the increase—on the streets, in the family, and as a result of armed conflicts, where women have become refugees with traumatic pasts and uncertain futures.11 Russian society is intrinsically patriarchal and has become more overtly so since 1991. Despite, or perhaps because of, the objective worsening of their position, women have been receptive to a cultural discourse that tells them that fulfilment will come by securing a husband and producing children and that the future of the country depends upon their doing so. We note that Soniia identifies herself and her fellow prisoners on the transport to Mordoviia as matrioshki, the self-replicating nested doll that is, at once, both the maternal metaphor of nationhood—Mat’ Rossiia (Mother Russia)—and a symbol of Russian womanhood. The doll signifies an all-enveloping nature that is the feminine and nurturing life-giving world of a mother and that links all Russian women to the ‘mysterious vitality of Mother Russia’. The reverence with which women are held in Russian cultural tradition inevitably has shaped society’s attitudes towards women who commit crimes, with the result that it is particularly receptive to normative notions of women’s behaviour that see their criminality as an example of the woman offending against her nature. The ‘normal’ woman, according to this line of thinking, is not aggressive or antisocial but, rather, must have something wrong with her. Gendered understanding of women’s offending behaviours has, of course, also informed thinking in the West. Feminist critique has largely bypassed Russian legal experts and criminologists, who still rely heavily on assumptions that women’s crime is rooted in psychological problems. Nevertheless, official statistics that have charted a change in women’s offending have forced a new awareness that patterns of women’s crime are linked to the dramatic socio-economic changes and cultural upheavals that accompanied the post-Soviet transformations. But there are still large lacunae, most notably the recognition that much of women’s crime takes place in the context of abusive domestic relationships. There is, moreover, still nostalgia for the Soviet past when women understood their social role. An article in 2004 in a leading legal periodical pointed a finger at the ongoing selfish model in society’s development that had corrupted women’s views about their goals and priorities in life and means of achieving them.12 It has fallen to independent commentators to interrogate in a gender-neutral way the deeper meanings of changing patterns of women’s criminal behaviours since 1991. Notable among these is Liudmila Al’pern, whose examination of what happens to women when they are arrested, their treatment in the courts, and how they are punished has identified institutionalized discrimination against women.13 Whatever challenges there are to professional and societal understanding of what motivates women to commit crime in Russia today, there remains a strong

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belief that a woman who has erred can be returned to her ‘inherent good nature’, and that one place where this can be done is prison. When the film melodrama Devochka (‘The Girl’), produced in consultation with a female ex-offender, was released in 2007 it was trailed as ‘a film that can change your life’ and hailed as ‘a thesis on a social topic’.14 The plot narrates the story of a school-leaver, Lena Iartseva, who embarks on a spate of petty theft that leads her into drugs and, eventually, to a women’s correctional colony. In various ways whilst a testing ground for new social models, the story reaffirms the traditional values of the matrioshka ethos. In the colony Lena’s moral and physical regeneration takes place. The ‘happy ending’ of the film is predetermined by the love between Lena and a journalist who comes to make a film of the prison but also, more importantly, by reaffirmation of traditional beliefs in the goodness of women. For troubled post-Soviet audiences, Lena is a symbol of hope for purification and renewal of the country’s cultural fortitude.

Women and prison in post-Soviet Russia We well understand that a woman is a mother, the preserver of the family home, and her fate cannot be separated from that of her family, relatives and children. Therefore, we in the penal service see it as incumbent to direct our efforts, and those of the state and society, to fight for the individual, especially when that individual is a woman. It is well known that in every modern society women, as well as juveniles, are the most vulnerable members of society. At the same time, the family, the health of the nation and its future depend upon how women live their lives. It is precisely these standpoints that inform Russian law as it applies to the punishment to women. (V. A. Zatonskii, Deputy Head of the department of social, psychological, and re-education work in FSIN, 2007)15

The message that women who ‘offend against their nature’ can be redeemed by a spell in a correctional colony is certainly one that appears to be dear to the heart of many involved with law and order in Russia. According to official statistics published by FSIN, on 1 January 2012 there were 61,692 women held in detention in the Russian Federation, of whom c.10,000 were on remand.16 The largest group of women with custodial sentences, according to 2010 figures, have committed drugrelated offences (35.6 per cent), followed by homicide (20.3 per cent), and theft (18.4 per cent).17 A majority of women in prison have lead chaotic lives prior to their incarceration. Taking one penal authority as an example, of its 2,500 women prisoners in 2007, 70 per cent suffered from alcoholism or drug addition, 37 per cent were described as ‘social parasites’, and 4.3 per cent had no fixed abode. To complete the picture of social disadvantage, 16.5 per cent had been brought up in state care institutions.18 In 2009, the average length of women’s sentences in Russia as a whole was 5 years 4 months, high by European standards. This compares with

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4 years 8 months in 1989.19 The ‘best case’ interpretation of this upward trend is that custodial sentences are being reserved for only the most serious offenders, although the share of first-time offenders serving custodial sentences increased from 55.8 per cent in 1989 to 63.6 per cent in 2009.20 Another explanation is that, reflecting the state and society’s current prejudices, the courts are particularly punitive towards drug-related offences and towards women committing ‘non-feminine’ crimes such as homicide. Women’s imprisonment has tracked the fluctuations in overall prisoner numbers in Russia since 1991, but with the significant difference that whereas the number of men in correctional colonies (that is, excluding those on remand) showed a 4 per cent decrease between 2007 and 2010, the equivalent figure for women was an increase of 38.8 per cent.21 The disproportionate rise in the number of women in prison has led to overcrowding in women’s penal colonies, where capacity is exceeded by one-third.22 It also means that the share of women in the total prison population has risen to 8.1 per cent, the highest percentage in Europe, bar Monaco and Andorra. The number of correctional colonies for adult women now stands at 46 (in 2000 there were 25), and that number is scheduled to increase under recently announced reforms to 58 by the year 2020.23 In addition, there are three educational colonies for juvenile women aged 14–18. The excess of prisoners over capacity is accommodated in a variety of ways that include creating women’s wings in ‘mixed’ remand facilities and colony-settlements (kolonii-poseleniia or ‘open prisons’ where women make up 11 per cent of the population), delaying the transfer of women from juvenile to adult colonies when they reach 21, extending the length of time in transportation from remand prison to colony, and by ‘doubling up’ accommodation in women’s colonies. The rise in the female prison population raises fundamental questions about the extent to which the kind of societal attitudes described in the section above towards women’s offending inform practice in the criminal justice system. Liudmila Al’pern has observed that modern criminology’s agenda with respect to women rarely occupies more than 3–10 pages in textbooks 300 pages long, and it was only in 2007 that courses focused on women’s detention were included in prison officer training programmes.24 The lack of interest in women is demonstrated also in the paucity of statistics in the public domain relating to women in the criminal justice system in general and in prisons in particular; official FSIN statistics, for example, record the number of women in detention who have been sentenced for different offences, but statistics for other vital measures—average length of sentence, age distribution of prisoners, number of custodial sentences served and so on— are generally aggregated for men and women or simply absent (such as the number of women in prison who are mothers). It is impossible, using published statistics, to construct a full time-series for the number of women in custody since 1991. Russian criminological journals carry few articles about women, and those that do are primarily concerned with legal questions with respect to their treatment by the courts and in custody, and quantitative analyses of their patterns and types of offending.25

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This does not mean that the Russian criminal justice system is blind to the special circumstances surrounding women’s offending and imprisonment; it would be inconsistent with society’s pledge to restore women to their traditional gender role were this not reflected in the conditions of their incarceration. Thus whilst, with the exception of maternal infanticide, there are no specifically female crimes included in the Russian penal code, women’s criminogenic needs are recognized when it comes to punishment. Women, together with juveniles (14–18 years) and male pensioners (65 years and over), are not subject to the death penalty—now, effectively, suspended—but most special provisions about women relate to their role as mothers. Thus, there are articles in the criminal corrections code that allow for the postponement (otsrochka) of a custodial sentence in the case of pregnant women or women with children under the age of fourteen who are convicted of crimes not against the person and that carry a sentence of under five years. On a child reaching fourteen, the court can require the woman to begin her sentence, but it may also reduce or cancel it. The same right to a reduced or postponed sentence applies to women already serving a custodial sentence who give birth, again depending upon the seriousness of the crime. For pregnant women and mothers of young children, there are various further provisions in the correction code. Mothers are permitted, subject to availability of places, to keep a child with them in detention until the age of three and to apply for a two-week furlough to settle the child with relatives or in a children’s home when the time comes for the child to leave. The same entitlement to furlough applies to mothers with a disabled child on the outside. The code also extends various material concessions to nursing mothers, other women with children in the colony nursery, and pregnant women. These include enhanced food rations and access to medicines and medical care, and the right to retain 50 per cent of earnings from work in colony production (in place of the normal 25 per cent). Pregnant women on maternity leave and nursing mothers cannot be held in disciplinary cells for violations of internal colony rules. These provisions of the criminal correction code are an indication of the strength of the ‘maternal mandate’ in the Russian criminal justice system. Later in this book we will be examining how the same mandate underpins much of the penal practice in women’s colonies, shaping, for example, the delivery of psychological services and approaches to re-socialization. A consequence of the privileging of women in general, and of existing or prospective mothers in particular, is that there are in-built inequalities in the treatment of different types of prisoner that, if we are concerned with the fairness of punitive practices, need to be justified. Markel, Collins, and Leib, controversially, critique policies in the USA that favour prisoners on the basis of their family status, arguing that it endangers the accurate and just imposition of punishment.26 Their target is the ‘family-ties benefits’ that accrue in the form of privileged access of prisoners with family to visitation rights and furloughs and in their being allocated to accessible prisons. The mainstream view among prison sociologists and penal practitioners, from which Russian legal experts would not dissent, is that such inequality is a price worth paying given the

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proven importance of maintaining family relationships to re-socialization and in meeting the welfare needs of the children of prisoners and their right to a family life. Still, it is worth noting that imprisoned fathers in Russia do not have the same two-week furlough rights as women with respect to settling children with carers or visiting a handicapped child. Legal experts and penal practitioners in Russia hold firm to the idea that children are a woman’s, not a man’s, business just as, as we shall see later in this book, they reinforce the ideal of the traditional family in rules on visitation rights. There are just two provisions in the Russian Federation’s criminal correction code that discriminate in favour of women, regardless of their childbearing or maternal status. First, women are entitled to receive an unlimited number of parcels compared with the one a month for men in equivalent regime colonies (the concession was granted because of women’s need to obtain sanitary products from outside as there was a chronic shortage in colonies in the 1990s); and secondly, women are entitled to a minimum of 3 square metres of living space, compared with 2 square metres for men.27 These material concessions are poor compensation for the extremely low level of amenity, minimal level of comfort, lack of privacy, and the bureaucratic control over their lives that women suffer in Russia’s remand prisons and penal colonies. Still less do they ameliorate the atmosphere in women’s colonies which, as in all penal institutions in Russia, is highly militarized. The well-travelled trope that prisons are quintessential male spaces still has much mileage where Russian women’s penal institutions are concerned. In 1998, to conform with justice norms and legalization within the Council of Europe which Russia joined in 1996, the prison service was transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Justice; and the cessation of practices such as using army conscripts as guards (the okhrana) soon followed. But de-militarization has been only partial and reminders of prison camps’ origins as one of the pillars of the ‘industrial army’ tasked with transforming the Soviet Union from undeveloped to mighty economy still abound in correctional colonies, including those for women. Prisoners are assigned to detachments, live in barrack-like accommodation and, if their labour is needed in the production zone, they are organized into brigades under the leadership of a ‘brigadier’. With the exception of some socalled non-attested employees, personnel in prisons and correctional colonies have military rank and are divided into an officer class, which has the main administrative jobs and is responsible for prisoner welfare and rehabilitation, and the ranks, who are the external (armed) and internal guards, the ‘convoy’ and dog handlers whose job it is to prevent escapes and to maintain order. Women prisoners are subject to roll calls twice a day. However, they no longer have to sing marching songs as they are moved en masse from one location in a colony to another. But prison personnel and guards do still march, salute and wear military uniforms and are subjected in their training to traditional military-style exercises, drill and practice in the use of a variety of weapons that sit uncomfortably with training in topics such as human rights and prisoner rehabilitation, which have been added to the existing curriculum.28

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Women and prison reform In an address to a conference on women’s imprisonment in 2007 Major-General Victor Mal’kov, the head of Ufsin-Mordoviia which is one of the Russian Federation’s larger regional penal authorities, made the following statement: ‘Prisoners serving their sentences in our institutions only lose their freedom.’29 He then went on to enumerate all the educational, psychological, training, entertainment, and visitational facilities and programmes that have been introduced in the three women’s colonies in his jurisdiction in the past decade. The list is, indeed, impressive. But the implication of Major-General Mal’kov’s words, that in all respects other than their loss of freedom women in the penal colonies enjoy a life that reflects that of the outside world, is more questionable. Reforms since 1991 have nudged Russian prisons along the spectrum from extreme to minimum conditions of confinement, as defined by Richard Lippke, but enforced idleness, exposure to violence and predation at the hands of other prisoners, arbitrary treatment by guards, loss of voting and other civil rights, restrictions on free speech, low levels of amenity, inadequate physical and mental care, solitary confinement and sensory deprivation are still features of confinement in Russian jails.30 As King and Piacentini have observed, the task confronting the authorities in 1991 was enormous: ‘Massive overcrowding in the SIZO remand prisons produced some of the most enduring images of Russian penal reform. Prison cells in Butyrka prison in Moscow designed for 20 were holding 60 plus prisoners. Staff rarely entered these squalid rooms, and with less than one square metre of space for each prisoner, weaker (physically and mentally) prisoners became vulnerable to the internal orders of cell bosses (blatniye). Cells that in England and Wales would be intended for 3 held 13 prisoners.’31 Conditions in penal colonies were marginally better but dilapidated fencing, subsidence of internal walls, peeling paint with rusting wire and steel panels, and the unmanned wooden watch towers featured everywhere. And HIV, AIDS, and antibiotic-resistant TB had now joined the penal system. The process of reform to address these problems began in the 1990s and has continued ever since.32 Significant landmarks were the transfer to the prison system of a justice framework in 1998 to reflect European penal and legal norms and practice. Russia’s accession into the Council of Europe in 1996 brought in its train 2,000 legislative amendments and acts including laws on the status of Judges, the agencies of the judicial community, state forensic activity, the work of defence lawyers and the Bar, freedom of conscience and religious association, and proportionate sentencing. More spaces were provided in remand prisons to accompany the new criminal procedure code in 2002, and federal funding increased alongside these considerable efforts to combat the problems of disease, squalor, and human rights abuses. Meanwhile prison officer salaries were doubled in the early 2000s, and housing and a network of health and holiday spas were provided for staff. There was a concerted attempt to get a ‘new message’ across to penal staff and to Russian society: that in this widely scattered prison system, major investment in changing penal sensibilities would follow changes to infrastructure.

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But, despite all the changes described above, powerful interests and institutional inertia continue to maintain Soviet models of penal management and norms in Russia. It used to be said of the Soviet Union that the clearest evidence that reform efforts were being frustrated was the frequency with which successive rounds of reform were announced. The past twenty years have witnessed a profusion of new regulations, laws, and ‘concepts’. The latest is the ‘Concept for the Development of the Correctional System to 2020’ which is ‘finally’ going to eliminate the vestiges of the gulag. Women have been among the beneficiaries of the steps that have been taken to move the Russian penal system towards a more humanitarian model. The evidence is that although women have not been singled out in the reforms, there is a growing recognition of the need to modify the practical application of new policies for women’s colonies. Although Russia still lacks the equivalent of the Corston Report (2007) in the UK, FSIN was said to be working on ‘a variety of practical recommendations, in part relating to the organization of psychological services for women prisoners and for women with children in colony nurseries and others’.33 According to FSIN, women prisoners have access to two to three resident psychologists trained in methods that respond to ‘the distinctive psychological needs of women’, as well as access to all levels of secondary education, skills training in a variety of industries and agriculture (this is through their work in colony production), and entertainments (through participation in a variety of ‘circles’ and competitions).34 Various trials in new methods of prisoner management and resocialization, which are customized to ‘women’s needs’, have been trialled in selected colonies. These include the development of a rehabilitation centre in one colony in Mordoviia to which women are moved six months before release for intensive preparation for life on the outside, ‘prophylactic centres’ within colonies to which women prisoners can go for assistance with legal problems, psychological support and advice on social services at any stage during their incarceration, two experimental mother-and-baby units where mothers can live together with their newborn infants, and communal accommodation located outside the colony for particularly well-behaved juvenile girls (the ‘Perspective’ Centre in L’govo colony, Riazan’ oblast).

Unfinished business For all these positives flowing from penal reform since 1991, there are ‘exemptions’ in the criminal correction code that result in women being disproportionately disadvantaged compared with the generality of men prisoners. The first exemption relates to the differentiation of offenders—by age, sex, sentence, seriousness of crime, recidivism, citizenship, health, and former place of work—that determines where, and under what regime, prisoners serve their sentences. Where adult men are concerned, sentence and frequency of past offending provide the main axes of differentiation; different category facilities are supposed to separate

The Archipelago and the Matrioshka

13

out career criminals and people convicted of particularly serious crimes in order to reduce intimidation and negative influences on the general mass of prisoners and to allow correctional work to be shaped to the challenges of different types of offender.35 In contrast to men, all adult women serve their sentences in the same category facilities. The consequence of this restricted choice is that women in prison for the first time and/or for offences of minor or medium level of seriousness serve their sentences with women convicted of particularly serious, violent offences and recidivists. In the context of the communal dormitories that constitute the accommodation in general regime colonies, this means different categories of offender living together. Why women should be treated differently from men in this way is not altogether clear: it might be that the prison service believes that women offenders are not the same danger to other women or have the same need for ‘targeted correctional work’ as is the case with men (such an argument would not be inconsistent with the societal view of all women’s innate goodness and reformability); or, alternatively, it might be that the prison service has calculated that the burdens imposed upon it of differentiating its treatment of women offenders outweigh the benefits accruing from treating them, in this respect, the same way as men. Whatever the explanation, the prison service is currently rethinking its exemption of women from the principle of differentiated conditions of incarceration; in its new ‘concept’ document it has stated the intention by 2020 of confining serious women offenders and recidivists in prisons with galleried accommodation, separate from first-time and less serious offenders. The mixing of different categories of women prisoners has not always been a feature of the Russian prison system; until a decade ago there were two strict regime women’s colonies to which repeat offenders and offenders convicted of especially serious crimes were sent. These were converted into general regime colonies because they lacked the capacity to meet the demand for strict regime places. But their conversion also helped, marginally, to improve another negative feature of women’s incarceration. This is the problem of distance, the central concern of this book. In discussions surrounding successive modifications of the criminal correction code to visitation and correspondence rights of prisoners, the Russian authorities have recognized the difficulty associated with the geographic distribution of its correctional facilities. This, simply summarized, is that the archipelago distribution of correctional facilities has turned out to be in fundamental conflict with the system’s post-1991 commitment to supporting the social and family links of prisoners. Not only do the isolation and the remote location of colonies constitute an obstacle to regular visitation, but they can also be an obstacle to other forms of communication; it costs a lot to send a parcel halfway round the Russian Federation, and telephone links to remoter places can be intermittent. In order to improve the situation, article 73 of the correction code provides for offenders to serve their sentences in penal colonies located in the subject of the Federation— that is the oblast, or republic—in which they are domiciled or committed their offence. This is a positive provision, except that it does not apply to women, or

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indeed to juveniles, foreigners, or to very serious offenders, men with life sentences and the death penalty. The reason for the exemption is the absence of an appropriate mix of colonies in all regions. In the case of adult women, if we assume one colony per region, there is a ‘shortage’ of 36 colonies; but the reality is that the situation is worse than this, because women’s colonies are clustered; for example, four in Perm’ krai (territory), three in Mordoviia and Chuvashiia, and so on. In 2009 33.7 per cent of women were incarcerated ‘out-of-region’ compared with 17.7 per cent of men.36 Juvenile women are particularly disadvantaged, since there are only three colonies for them in the whole of the Russian Federation. Soniia’s and Liudmila’s narratives have already given some hint of one of the knock-on effects of the distribution of prisons in the long transportations they had to endure. In the chapters that follow we explore many more. The ‘geography question’, as we will argue, is not just a question of the obstacles to maintaining contact with relatives; there are also repercussions on women’s identity construction, their social relationships in the colony, their sense of where they are and how they got there, their understanding of their surroundings, and their responses to the regime’s attempts to ‘correct’ them and return them to their role as defined by the matrioshka ethos.

How this book is organized The book is structured around stages and levels—in our argument, in the organization of (penal) space, and in prisoners’ experiences and the transformations they undergo. The second introductory chapter, Chapter 2, describes the sources of our empirical evidence and discusses how we approached their use in developing our argument. Our principal source was interviews and conversations with a large number of people who are involved in various ways with Russian prisons— prisoners, personnel, NGO employees, and bystanders—supplemented by conventional social surveys. Without, we hope, labouring the point, we describe the challenges that we encountered in working in a different cultural and linguistic setting from our own (that is, England and Scotland); these included the recruitment and training of on-shore researchers to help with data gathering, the negotiation of access to correctional colonies with a penal authority that remains secretive and suspicious of outsiders, and the management of our prejudices, presuppositions, and shortcomings when it came to interpretation. The substantive chapters of the book that follow fall naturally into two. Part I, ‘Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality’, considers how the Russian penal system unfolded in space and time to assume the characteristic structure that is has today. This provides the framework for our consideration in Part II, ‘Women Prisoners’ Experiences of Carceral Russia’, of the impact of this geography on how women prisoners experience different stages of their incarceration, the social relationships they are able to sustain and develop with others inside prison and outside, and their responses to the re-education and re-socialization efforts of the authorities.

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One of the hallmarks of the ‘geographer’s craft’ is to subject whatever relationship is under observation to scalar analysis; that is, geographers like to examine how phenomena are ‘produced and reproduced’ at different spatial scales—the macro (national), meso (regional), and micro (local) scales of conventional spatial analysis, to which ‘the global’ has been added in the past 20–30 years. In the three chapters of Part I we follow this convention, discussing Russia’s penal geography at descending spatial scales, the aim being to describe the ‘physical architecture of penality’ that constrains the choices that can be made about where prisoners are sent and that shapes their experiences. The archipelago metaphor is helpful here. Thus, in Chapter 3 we discuss the current distribution of penal institutions in the Russian Federation, identifying where the principal ‘islands’ (the correctional colonies in which prisoners serve their terms) and ‘ports’ (the remand and transit prisons they pass through getting to them) of the archipelago are located, and we describe the evolution of the current distribution as the outcome of the process of socio-spatial regulation having roots in Imperial Russia’s and the USSR’s transportation of convicts to Siberia. Descending the spatial scale, in Chapter 4 we focus attention on correctional colonies in their regional and local setting. One element of the prison reforms discussed earlier in this chapter is that whilst major policy decisions about the management of prisoners remain centralized in Moscow, devolution has shifted some decision-making power to regional penal authorities. This shift towards the regions has been happening at the same time as the previous autonomy of the penal service has begun to be eroded by its forced engagement with outside authorities. Whereas, in the past, penal authorities were able to ignore civilian authorities, local government reforms in the 2000s have forced their mutual engagement. We discuss the nature of these new interactions through a case study of one regional penal authority and show how continuing poor coordination between penal and civilian spheres at the local level increases prisoners’ isolation. Descending one more spatial scale in Chapter 5, we discuss the extent to which the internal physical architecture of penal colonies compensates for, or exacerbates, these deprivations at the level of the individual penal facility. The relationship between ‘the distribution of bodies in space’ and power is one of the areas where penological and geographical studies have come together in recent years in the explorations of the panoptic effects of institutional design. The building block of the correctional colony is the barrack and dormitory, which, in direct lineage from the gulag, has more in common with the mass confinement of the ‘asylum’ than the cellular division of space of the modern Western penitentiary. Later chapters explore how the micro-organization of penal space plays out in women’s adaptation to imprisonment and the relationships they develop with each other and penal authority. In Chapter 5 the focus is on how space and time are configured by the penal authorities to help them exercise power and control in women’s colonies. The discussion of the spatial organization of the penal system is the first stage in our argument about geography as punishment. In other jurisdictions prisoners can be sent long distances to serve their sentences and prison always involves

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isolation, but in Russia the distances and isolation constitute, we argue, an extreme condition of confinement. The analysis in Part II focuses on the deprivations that follow from this exceptional penal geography. In Chapters 6 and 7 we follow women prisoners on the journey all have to undertake from arrest, through initial incarceration in a remand prison, transportation, arrival at their destination colony, quarantine, and initial period of adaptation. We describe this as a process of penal phasing which, when broken down, reveals how women are disciplined through mobility. The passage of women to prison in Russia is revealing of how different forms of knowledge come to be transcribed onto the body of the prisoner during motion towards the prison institution. Chapters 8 and 9 treat distance in its more static and Kantian sense, in examining how the relative location of correctional colonies affects patterns of women prisoners’ engagement with the outside world and, in particular, with their family members. In Chapter 8 we discuss the extent to which the distance at which women serve their sentences from their home region affects patterns of visitation and with what consequences for relationships with their families. Chapter 9 is devoted to the relationship women prisoners are able to maintain with their children and examines how they make decisions about their care. Of special interest is the decision with respect to babies born to women in custody and the alternative care options that exist and how these are resolved. Isolation is the framework for the discussion in the final three chapters of the book. They consider social relationships within colonies and women’s responses to the penal authorities’ approach to their re-socialization. Again the focus is on the effects of carceral ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ on the experiences of women prisoners. In Chapter 10, we discuss the different levels of social organization that develop among women, including formal and informal status hierarchies. We examine the impact on women prisoners of the life en masse in the communal dormitories and how it affects levels of interpersonal prisoner and prisoner– personnel trust. Russian prison personnel insist that conflict is not a feature of social relationships in women’s colonies, but we argue that this judgement is based on a gendered approach to women’s incarceration and one that uses men’s colonies as a comparator. The gendered approach of the penal service informs our discussion in Chapters 11 and 12, in which we focus on how, in the isolated context of women’s penal colonies, the authorities approach the task of resocialization through an examination of the measures taken to address criminogenic need. We show how Russia is fixated on the humanization of punishment (rights-based discourses) and an emphasis on re-education for re-socialization, which proceeds according to perceived threats to the gendered roles women perform in the family and in society. In Chapters 11 and 12 we also explore what Russian prison authorities actually understand by ‘criminogenic need’ and identify how Russia parts company from the European practices to which it aspires. Finally, in the Epilogue, we briefly discuss the content of the current reform proposals as they relate to the geo-penological issues we raise and the prospects for change.

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Notes 1. Shapovalov, V., Remembering the Darkness. Women in Soviet Prisons (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2001), pp. 243–61. 2. A former inmate of a correctional colony for women, interviewed in 2008. 3. Ugolovno-ispolnitel’nyi kodeks Rossiiskii Federatsii. Po sostoianiiu na 2009 (Eksmo: Moscow, 2009). 4. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (Penguin/Peregrin Books: London, 1979), p. 264. 5. Solzhenitsyn, A., The Gulag Archipelago (Collins: Glasgow, 1974) vol. I, pp. ix-x. 6. The one exception is Perm’ 36, which since 1994 has been undergoing restoration as a museum of the gulag. The official website is http://www.perm36.ru [accessed May 2012]. 7. Khlevniuk, O. V., The History of the Gulag, From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2004), p. 344. 8. Appelbaum, A., Gulag. A History of the Soviet Concentration Camps (Allen Lane, Penguin: London, 2003), p. 287. 9. Pallot, J., ‘ “Gde muzh, tam zhena” (Where the husband is, so is the wife): space and gender in post-Soviet patterns of penality’, Environment and Planning A 39 (2007), pp. 570–89. 10. Attwood, L., The New Soviet Man and Woman. Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1990). 11. Johnson J. E., ‘Privatising pain: the problem of women battering in Russia’, NWSA Journal, 13/3 (2010), pp. 153–68. 12. Shotkinov, A., ‘K voprosu o motivatsii korystnoi zhenskoi prestupnosti’, Gosudarstvo i Pravo, 9 (2004), pp. 106–8. 13. Al’pern, L., Son i Iav’ Zhenskoi Tiur’my (Aleteiia: St Petersburg, 2004). 14. The film addresses many contemporary topics concerned with youth, including drugs, money, and clubbing. See http://www.lazarev-ml.ru/mlist-devochka.htm [accessed May 2012]. 15. Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia: ‘Zhenshchiny v mestakh lishsheniia svobody’, 11–13 oktobria 2007, Sbornik materialov (PRI: Moscow, 2008), p.16. 16. Calculated from FSIN website, http://www.fsin.su/statistics/ [accessed May 2012]. 17. Ibid. 18. Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia, op. cit., p. 74. The use of the phrase ‘social parasite’ is a throwback to the Soviet era. Its use by this source refers to the unemployed. 19. Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), p. 36. 20. Ibid., p. 24. 21. Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, 2010 at http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b10_13/IssWWW.exe/ Stg/d3/10-11.htm. Confirmation of the upward trend in women’s recorded crime is given in Kazakova, op cit., p. 7, who gives an increase between 2006 and 2010 of 36.1 per cent. 22. http://newsru.co/russia/06apr2010/zbrchk.html [both sites accessed May 2012]. 23. Kontseptsiia razvitiia ugolovno-ispolnitel’noi sistemy v Rossiiskii Federatsii do 2020 (FSIN: Moscow, 2010), approved by the government of the RF 14 October 2010 no. 1772-r, available online at http://fsin.su/Original_doc/Koncepciya_UIS.doc [accessed May 2012]. 24. Al’pern, 2004, op. cit., p. 9. 25. Katz, E. and Pallot, J., ‘From femme normale to femme criminelle in Russia: against the past or towards the future?’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 44 (2010). 26. Markel, D., Collins, J., and Leib, E., Privilege or Punish. Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009). 27. Mikhlin, A. S. (ed.), Ugolovno-ispolnitel’noe pravo: Vishee obrazovanie (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2007), p. 312. 28. International Centre for Prison Studies, Guidance Note 7, ‘Moving prisons to civilian control— Demilitarization’ (ICPS: London, 2004).

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29. Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia, op. cit., p. 77. 30. Lippke, R., Rethinking Imprisonment (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007), ch. 5. 31. King, R. and Piacentini, L., ‘The correctional system during transition’, in R. W. Pridemore (ed.), Ruling Russia: Crime, Law, and Justice in a Changing Society (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2005). 32. Piacentini, L., ‘Penal identities in Russian prison colonies’, Punishment & Society, 6/2 (2004a), pp. 131–47; Piacentini, L., Surviving Russian Prisons: Punishment, Economy and Politics in Transition (Willan: Cullompton, 2004b); Piacentini, L., ‘After the gulag’, New Humanist, 2 (2005), pp. 16–19. 33. Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia , op. cit., p. 16. Corston Report. A report by Baroness Jean Corston of a review of women with particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system (Home Office: London, 2007). 34. Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia , op. cit., pp. 17–20. 35. Mikhlin, A. S., Kharakteristika osuzhdennykh k lisheniiu svobody. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi, 1999, vol. 1 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), pp. 221–2. In reality, the separation of different category prisoners operates imperfectly and there is mixing, especially of recidivists with first-time offenders. 36. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 44.

2 Researching Women’s Carceral Experience in Russia The traveller reflected: intervening in other people’s affairs is always fraught with risks. He wasn’t a citizen of the penal colony, or of the state to which it belonged. If he wanted to condemn this execution, or even seek to obstruct it, he laid himself open to the objection: you’re a stranger, what do you know? To which he would have had no reply; at most he could have added that he was a little surprised at himself, because he was travelling with the desire to see things for himself, and not at all to meddle in foreign notions of justice. (Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony)1

Research into women’s imprisonment Nowadays there is an impressive and abundant range of sociological research into women’s imprisonment bringing into light certain gender-based incarcerative norms and practices, including how women’s prisons contain their own institutional patterns of social control, their own internal bureaucratic dynamics for tackling acute mental health issues, and their own punitive structures.2 Feminist criminologists explore how women’s experiences of criminal justice are rooted in gender typifications of what can be called a normative femininity, the hallmark of which is gender stereotyping.3 Research consistently shows that women are more vulnerable to being targeted by disciplinary measures that seek to induce a state of conformity to normative femininities. The study of penality as it relates to women has grown in recent years as worldwide more and more women are being incarcerated. Research has shown that the response of criminal justice agencies has been to shape regimes around ‘responsibilization’ strategies, which burden prisoners with what once were state responsibilities.‘Need’ has been redefined as ‘risk’, and ‘positivist empiricism’, mystifying the socio-economic and cultural backdrops to offending, is furnishing regimes with a theoretical raison d’être and power to punish. That there has been a persistent failure of governments to reduce female prison populations whilst ‘hyping up’ interventionist approaches organized around therapeucratic norms is a significant development and has generated a variety of questions about penal legitimacy and ‘keeping the state at arm’s length’. The rapid

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increase in ‘partnerships’ involving non-state agencies has led many to question the state’s capacity and commitment to maintaining its power to punish. Concomitantly, research into women’s imprisonment has shifted towards this focus of enquiry, to consider how risk-based accreditation criteria affect women’s experience of incarceration and has theorized about how states can claim success in punishing women. Carlen describes how this tension is creating a ‘carceral clawback’, because the conventional wisdom that prison is the punishment and not for punishment is under threat.4 Research into women’s prisons tells us that regimes have evolved from places where social control is quietly fostered, to an operating principle organized around the ‘what works’ agenda. We do not have the space here to analyse current prison research into women offenders. It is sufficient to say that academic scholarship on women’s imprisonment tends to focus on regime development and the ideological and operational principles that are keeping women inside prison and that, it can be argued, are producing and reproducing specific cultural and criminogenic conditions which lead to a woman’s eventual return to prison. Sentences do not see imprisonment as a last resort but use it, instead, to address need.5 Our research contributes to current prison scholarship in arguing that disciplinary power is gendered and that imprisonment is acutely more painful for women because women offenders are cast as a criminal class whose ‘immorality’ produces ‘feminine sin’. In Chapter 1 we noted that cultural antecedents and values have tended to exclude women from debate. What makes Russian women’s imprisonment, and our research, distinctive is how the social, cultural, and political turbulence of the postUSSR period has given rise to a consensus on female criminality that is culturally driven and not based on actuarial norms of crime and re-offending, including risk assessments.6 Russian criminal justice and penal policy, as mentioned in Chapter 1, has gone through monumental and extraordinary change despite the wider economic and political turbulences that have marked—and indeed scarred—Russia in the post-Soviet era. Of key note is that prison in Russia is perceived not as a corrective for women’s individual welfare needs, but as a site where gendered regimes of incarceration can, and should, aim to re-configure women’s roles. Gender-specific punitiveness, we argue, is fluid and embedded in a society which has an overriding memory of a bygone era marked by a strong penological identity and where women were ‘gendered-cultured subjects’.7

Doing prison research on women in Russia Doing prison research is universally recognized as challenging. Doing prison research in a country whose troubled penal history makes the authorities particularly sensitive and suspicious of outsiders renders the challenges even more acute. Below, we describe how we were forced to deviate in very radical and significant ways from our original research design and strategy, but it is nevertheless important to observe that the years since 1991 have marked a genuine move towards greater transparency

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on the part of the Russian penal service. Indeed, during the first decade of the postSoviet era extraordinary possibilities opened up for investigations of the Russian prison system—academic and journalistic, and by foreigners and domestic enquirers. For English-speaking audiences, three monographs were landmarks for framing Russian prison experiences in Western sociological perspectives: Mary McAuley’s (2010) Children in Custody: Anglo-Russian Perspectives; Anton Oleinik’s (2003) Organized Crime, Prison and Post-Soviet Society; and Laura Piacentini’s (2004) Surviving Russian Prisons: Punishment, Economy and Policy in Transition. These drew on interviews conducted in penal colonies in diverse Russian regions, respectively, to discuss juvenile detention, criminal sub-cultures, and the consequences of the 1990s’ economic crisis and political transformation for penal labour. Liudmila Al’pern’s (2004) Son i Iav’ Zhenskoi Tiur’my (Dreams and nightmares in women’s prisons), sadly not translated into English to reach a wider audience, does the equivalent for women prisoners in the 1990s, while Elena Omel’ chenko’s Do i posle tiuriny (Before and After Prison) tells the stories of women prisoners in their own words. The window of opportunity that enabled these works has now shut as outsiders’ access to prisons for the purposes of reporting and researching conditions has become increasingly more difficult, bureaucratized and hedged around with conditions. This may be associated with the consolidation of the ‘power vertical’ under Vladimir Putin and a reassertion of the authority of the security services after a period of contraction in the1990s. Suspicion has revived, in particular of foreign interest, unless associated with state-to-state programmes or with obligations and requirements associated with Russia’s membership of the Council of Europe. As a result, the sort of speculative research represented by our project and its precursors is less easy to get permission to do. This would be of no particular moment were it the case that there was a native research community pushing at the frontiers of penological theory, but, with some notable exceptions, this is not the case.

Negotiating access Negotiations for access for our research began in 2005 and continued for eighteen months. The outcome was a ‘collaborative agreement’ made between the University of Oxford on behalf of the ESRC project and the Academy of Law and Penal Management in Riazan’ (hereafter the Riazan’ Academy). The latter is one of several education institutions for prospective penal officers. The collaboration was designed to be a vehicle for the development of a joint Russian–UK project that addressed questions of mutual interest in the area of women’s imprisonment within the context of Russia’s inherited penal geography. Under the terms of the collaboration, the Russian partners took responsibility for organizing access and permissions to an agreed list of penal colonies and were to participate in the collection and analysis of data in the field, produce summaries of official statistics and other secondary materials, co-author research reports for dissemination in Russia, and organize a workshop bringing together penal practitioners from different regions

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of Russia. Knowledge transfer was built into the collaboration in the form of a UK-based workshop and schedule of prison visits in the UK. Seminars on various aspects of prison research, including ethics and qualitative research techniques, were also included as part of the preparatory period for joint UK–Russian fieldwork in prisons. The detailed fieldwork schedule was based on a pilot study, conducted in a colony for juvenile female offenders in Riazan’ oblast, in 2006, which administered a questionnaire survey and interviewed prisoners. In the light of the experiences of the pilot study, we proceeded to develop surveys and a schedule of questions for the main project which, after several iterations, were approved by our research partners. This stage of planning also involved discussions about the procedures for obtaining the informed consent of our subjects. In order to examine prisons in their local setting, we also devised a questionnaire survey and interview schedule for the communities that are host to ‘penal zones’. Visits were scheduled for April 2007; the destination was the south-west corner of the Republic of Mordoviia, the location of seventeen penal colonies of different status, three of which are for women. In an article published in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Richa Nagar composes a poem about the ending of a fruitful collaboration in the field.8 The poem is a reminder of the embodied nature of collaboration that involves real people trying to reach a mutual agreement about goals, an understanding of the socio-political context within which the collaboration is taking place, and accommodation to different accumulated wisdoms about how best to get things done. It also addresses the very personal nature of the premature ending of a collaboration, and more broadly, therefore, the issue of ‘access denied’. Unfortunately, Nagar’s poem became relevant for us, as five months after the completion of fieldwork in Mordoviia, the Riazan’ Academy informed us in the briefest of e-mails that it was withdrawing from the collaboration and was withholding the results of our joint fieldwork. Losing access to the field (both as a territory and research problem) is an occupational hazard for geographers, whilst the difficulty of gaining access in the first place is a commonplace problem for prison sociologists; but, despite this, there is relatively little in the methodological guides to fieldwork about being ejected from the field. Notwithstanding the assurance we had been given by the Riazan’ Academy that our project had been approved ‘at the highest level’, a ‘scientific commission’ in Moscow convened after we had completed our fieldwork ruled that the materials we had gathered were ‘not of the sort permitted to foreigners’. Our loss of access to the field was taken to a further level with the removal of our entitlement to visas for travel to Russia. Months of preparatory work had gone into ironing out with the Russian partners the problems that might arise in the field and a degree of understanding and mutual respect was reached between the parties. In these negotiations we had consciously taken steps to avoid the paternalistic and triumphalist attitudes of some Western researchers who engaged in collaborative research with Russian higher educational institutions in the early post-Communist period. We were also

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sensitive to the fact that the Riazan’ Academy was a part of the Federal Penal Service and that our collaborators were all penal personnel of military rank. Our approach to discussing the detailed questions we wished to pursue with prisoners and personnel was, therefore, informed by the principle of ‘appreciative enquiry’ advocated by Alison Liebling. Appreciative enquiry is ‘a way of looking at an organisation, which concentrates on strengths, accomplishments, best practice and peak moments’.9 Furthermore, we were aware of the constraints which the socio-political context imposed on our Russian collaborators, and so were selective about the elements of the original research plan that we would try to insist upon and which we were prepared to forego. Our priority in negotiating the terms of access was the integrity of any information gathered in the field; we preferred to abandon a planned data-gathering exercise than produce results for which we could not vouch. The need for flexibility in the field is only to be expected—it is rare to be able to realize every point of a fieldwork plan—and we had assumed that adjustments would have to be made. We had approached the collaboration with this understanding, but by far the most challenging aspect of the collaboration was the conceptual and epistemological distance that separated the UK and the Riazan’ team. Russian penology is predominantly quantitative and, to the extent that they had research experience, our Russian partners were saturated with the assumptions and methodologies of positivism which proved to be impossible to dislodge. This had a direct and negative impact upon the quality and character of data we gathered in the field. Even before the Russian partners withdrew from the project, we had begun to discuss among ourselves alternative strategies for accessing our research field. The ending of the collaboration accelerated these discussions, but the ban on our entry to the Russian Federation implied a more radical reconfiguration than we had expected to have to make, and it was, of course, unwelcome. As with other cases of losing access to the field, there is a particular set of circumstances surrounding the end of our collaboration with the Russian Penal Service. The official explanation given by the Russian side was force majeure, but the precise nature of the ‘circumstances beyond control’ and from where in the Russian penal and state bureaucracy they originated has never been clarified; we were not aware of any revolution or war, earthquake or flood happening to interrupt our research. There are several possible explanations, but there is little to be gained from speculation. However, it is relevant that the domestic and international political context was not propitious.10 Effectively, we were embroiled in a grid of power relations over which we could exercise little control. As we observed women prisoners, so we ourselves were observed and ‘othered’; hence the guarded responses to our requests, our research partners’ condescending attitudes when discussing research goals, the projection onto the UK research team of a hierarchical order that elevated the role of the PI whilst marginalizing the co-equal participants of the project, and the omnipresent ‘minders’ who shadowed our every movement in the field. Judging from conversations with other researchers who have lost access to the field, our reactions to being excluded were typical: anger and ‘mourning’ for

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multiple losses—in our case, of a mass of good research materials, projects that would now never be, professional networks cultivated over years, and, more personally, of the ability to visit valued friends and places—followed by a period of intense reflexivity. Inevitably, much of the reflection concerned what we might have done differently and, more uncomfortably, whether our intent on seeing the research through to the end had clouded our judgement about the academic and ethical compromises that had been forced upon us. Carlen’s words that ‘critical penology must try not only to think the unthinkable about women’s imprisonment, but also speak the unspeakable about the conditions in which and by which it is known’ rang loudly in our ears.11 In the event, the Russian Penal Service’s somewhat dramatic withdrawal from the project made the decision for us about what the nature of our relationship with it was going to be post-Mordoviia. The decision we now faced, rather, was whether to abandon the project or, alternatively, to explore with the Economic and Social Research Council the possibility of continuation, involving as this must a reconfiguration of our broad research, dissemination, and knowledge-sharing goals and the identification of alternative ethically-sound and risk-minimizing means of accessing materials and data from the field. The ESRC responded positively to the second alternative, allowing us to pause the project for one year to produce a rescue plan, which we duly did, the project resuming at the beginning of 2008 with redefined aims and new research partners. We simultaneously kept up pressure on the Riazan’ Academy to meet its contractual obligations up to the point when it had withdrawn from the project. This was important both for the project and for the questions of intellectual freedom that our exclusion raised for other researchers interested in Russia. Experience of other scholars denied access to the Russian Federation suggested that maintaining pressure could eventually yield results. In our case, the decisions to withhold both our research materials and our personae non gratae status were reversed, the latter albeit temporarily, sometime in early 2009, although there was to be no resumption of the collaboration with the penal service. The point of describing the difficulties we encountered in gaining and maintaining access to the field is to provide a framework for our discussion of the character of the research materials upon which we draw in this book. The disappointment consequential on the end of our relationship with FSIN was more than compensated for by the opportunities for triangulation and broadening of the scope of our investigation that arose from widening participation in the project of social researchers who were not penal agents. The obvious response to failure of the collaboration was to explore the possibility of employing on-shore researchers to take up where we had left off. Assuming that there would be difficulties recruiting people to help us who could gain access to correctional colonies, our initial approach was to shift our focus to researching ex-prisoners. Whilst the use of exprisoners as subjects would require us to grapple with epistemological problems of memory, and for this reason we had not included them in our original research strategy, the advantage of conversations with ex-prisoners was that they could be

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less structured than with serving prisoners, they could take place in private, and the penal authorities did not have to be involved. We were fortunate to be able to employ the services of Region, a social research organization based in the city of Ulianovsk. During the course of 2008–9 a team from Region recruited 24 women for interview. We discuss these subjects in the next section. Region also took on the task of ‘returning’ to Mordoviia to repeat the questionnaire survey that had been conducted by our former collaborators with the local population living in and near the penal zone. Region provided us with immensely rich materials which forced us to reflect upon the answers that we had received in our interviews with prisoners serving sentences in Mordoviia and Riazan’. The second plank of our rescue strategy, to explore the possibility of using independent researchers to continue our interviews inside women’s penal colonies, fortunately also turned out to be possible. We identified two independent analysts who were pursuing their own research in penal colonies who had synergies with our work and were willing to restructure their interview schedules to include issues relevant to our project. By the end of 2009 the diversification of our sources meant that we had more than filled the gap left by the collapse of the collaboration with the Penal Service. Inevitably, the rescue strategy we pursued raised tricky ethical issues. At the time that the services of the alternative research teams were engaged, we had been banned by the Russian authorities and the data that we had gathered deemed ineligible to be seen by foreigners. It is evidence of how far Russian society has travelled since the Soviet era that, despite this, we were able to find people in Russia who were prepared to continue our research for us, although at the time they preferred not to advertise this to anyone in a position of authority. To that extent the research had a covert element with respect to the penal authorities. We have taken the decision to retain the anonymity of some of the people who helped us and of the colonies in which they conducted interviews on our behalf, in order not to put at risk these individuals’ future access.

Qualitative enquiry: conversations with women prisoners In the chapters that follow we use the words of women prisoners and ex-prisoners to explore how Russia’s penal geography affects or affected their lives. These are taken from 119 interviews conducted by three different research teams during the period 2006 to 2010. Differences in expertise of the interview teams, in the subject-positions of the interviewers and in externally imposed constraints were marked, and each raised a specific set of epistemological and methodological issues. This meant that the questions that were raised with the interview partners, the way in which they were raised, and the knowledge that could be excavated from them varied. As an example, constraints on the interviews conducted by the UK team, which we will describe below, provided little scope for analysis of the attitudes, feelings, and meanings of the experiences of our interview participants. On the other hand, they are rich in practical detail and, together with the results of

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our quantitative survey, provided us with valuable systematic information on the structuring of everyday life in correctional colonies. As importantly, themes surfaced during the course of our interviews that allowed us to modify the questions to be explored with subsequent participant groups interviewed by other people. At the other end of the spectrum to the interviews we conducted, interviews with exprisoners allowed participants to narrate their experiences and to take part in identifying themes; these interviews yielded rich texts of women’s talk that provide a pathway into the more imaginative world of the women prisoners. As we have explained above, this plurality of method applied to different subject groups was not in the original research design and required a degree of analytical dexterity on our part. But we were reluctant to discard any interviews because of incommensurability and/or methodological anxieties that were involved in their production. Our approach might thus be characterized as post-positivist critical realist; in triangulating across multiple sources that contain errors and different, fallible, perspectives, we believe we have produced an account of women prisoners’ experience of Russia’s penal geography that at some level is ‘right’ about reality. We continue to a detailed discussion of qualitative sources that, necessarily, follows the boundaries between the three discrete interview groups.

Tamara tries to explain to Judith the special features of the Russian soul that it is difficult for an Englishwoman to understand Sequentially, the first interviews to be conducted were those that involved the UK team and the Riazan’ Academy research partners. Women from three penal institutions were interviewed in 2006 and 2007: 30 were juvenile offenders in the L’govo juvenile colony in Riazan’ oblast, and 35 adults in two penal institutions, IK2 (correctional colony number 2) and K-P8 (colony-settlement number 8), in Yavas in Mordoviia. We were not involved in the selection of participants for the interviews in either case, but they did meet criteria we had agreed in advance with respect to the range of ages, sentence lengths, marital and family status, and, importantly given the focus of our investigation, their normal place of residence. We have no reason to believe that the assurances we were given, that participants came forward on the basis of the statement of informed consent that we had agreed in advance with the Riazan’ collaborators, were untrue. We were, naturally, suspicious that participants had been screened by the penal authorities for their blagonadezhnest’ or trustworthiness, and we kept this possibility in mind during analysis. Interviews took place in the education blocks of the colonies in L’govo and Yavas, but women from the colony-settlement were interviewed in the headquarters of the regional penal authority. Interviews took place in parallel sessions, each led by one of the UK collaborators who was accompanied by a member of the Russian team.12 A member of the colony personnel also sat in on the interviews. It was far from ideal to have three authority figures involved in each interview, but

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our requests for men to be excluded from interviews and for the members of the Riazan’ team to wear civilian clothes were met. Penal personnel, for the most part, sat discretely at a distance out of sight of the woman being interviewed and did not interrupt (although they did sometimes after an interview was finished ‘correct’ the answers we had been given to our questions). We had been asked to submit a bank of questions in advance that we wished to explore in the interviews. These were grouped into the following broad categories: biographical information; the journey to and arrival at the colony; contacts with home; life in the colony; preparations for release; gender issues. The interviews were conducted in Russian and were led by either the UK or Riazan’ team member, depending upon the fluency of Russian-speaking of the UK team member, the understanding of the Russian ‘minder’ of her role, and crucially her relationship with the UK team member. These variables, it turned out, were extremely influential in the quality of the interviews, especially as the Russian partners had limited experience of taking interviews. Initially, the Russian partners understood their role as ensuring that every conversation with a prisoner followed the same script, and it took several interviews before they were able to relax into a less structured format. Each UK–Russian pairing developed a modus operandi as interviews progressed, but most of the interviews fell far short of what we would have liked. We have already mentioned that the scope for exploring themes that emerged with follow-up questions was limited and, in some cases, certain lines of questioning were interrupted by the Russian partners. Opportunities to raise certain topics that are fundamental to prison sociology, such as the social relationships between women prisoners, issues around personal safety and non-compliance, did not arise as we were under constant pressure to move on to the next question on the approved list and to the next participant. But the more fundamental problem was that there was neither the time nor were the circumstances of the interviews propitious for building an empathetic rapport with the participants. The extract below, which reproduces verbatim part of the transcript eventually released by the Riazan’ partners, can serve as illustration. It is from an interview conducted with a prisoner in IK2 in April 2007 by a member of the UK team who asks the questions (‘Judith’ in the extract) and Colonel Tamara Schmaeva of the Riazan’ Academy: Q. Would it have been better if you had been able to serve your sentence closer to home? What do you think? A. Better further from home. Q. (Tamara explains about distance. That what is near in Russia is a long distance in England. Russia—is Russia.) All the same, why is it you say that it’s better the further away? A. When I was in prison in my town, it was a lot more difficult for me. I was homesick, it made me depressed. I thought that there beyond the walls are my friends, my relatives, it was emotionally tough.

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Q. (Tamara tries to explain to Judith the special features of the Russian soul that it is difficult for an English woman to understand.) Why is it better for you here? A. It’s like being a guest here, it’s temporary, you know it is going to end.

This extract, which would serve very well as an example of how not to conduct an interview for an undergraduate research methods class, also serves to demonstrate the unconscious ‘othering’ to which we were subjected by our Russian partners, as well as usefully highlighting the issues around the principles of transcription. Needless to say, perception of distance is central to much geographical enquiry, and how it is mediated by socio-economic, political, and psychological factors is a thread running through our argument in the chapters that follow. Colonel Schmaeva’s interruption to explain the culturally-mediated concept of relative distance prevented the interviewer pursuing with this particular prisoner the multiple meanings that distance and remoteness had for her and also placed a barrier between interviewer and interviewee, who had learned that the interviewer would not properly understand her responses. By the same token, the subsequent pause for the treatise on the Russian soul (which made the point that the family is fundamental to Russian identity in the way that it is not to the English) inhibited further exploration of the prisoner’s experiences of adaptation in the remand prison. The interventions are sui generis interesting, although they were intensely frustrating at the time. The extract also highlights some of the problems that arise when transcription becomes a ‘chore’.13 The importance of thinking hard about the transcription processes in qualitative research and how they can affect the way participants are understood is recognized by social researchers.14 Our aim was a modest ‘full and faithful’ transcription of the conversations we had with prisoners that would allow us to analyse accurately the substance of the interview; that is, the meanings and perceptions created and shared during a conversation.15 In short, we were aiming for transcripts that lay nearer the ‘de-naturalized’ end of the naturalism/de-naturalism spectrum. We recognized that this meant that we would lose the meanings that could be conveyed in verbal hesitations, emphasis, repetitions, and non-verbal asides. The transcriptions of our interviews in L’govo and Riazan’, in the event, stand somewhere beyond the de-naturalism end of the spectrum; not only does the male transcriber make summaries of conversations that took place during the interview, he also omits the beginning of interviews when introductions are being made and, importantly, consent being discussed. He also allowed himself a particularly generous interpretation of what constitutes ‘interview noise’ in leaving out particular ‘extraneous’ comments. We have attributed the difficulties the UK team experienced in encouraging women to ‘open up’ mainly to the circumstances of the interviews, but inevitably our nationality was a marker of our difference that, even in the best of circumstances, would have had a bearing on how we attended to issues of positionality. Among geographers, concerns about misrepresentation and inauthenticity have resulted in an avoidance of fieldwork in the Global South, and there is a large

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feminist literature on writing ‘with’ rather than writing ‘about’ or ‘for’ women that attempts to address the concerns about marginalization, essentialization, and differences in their representation.16 But the accumulated experience of decades of work among women in developing societies, unfortunately, does not transfer easily to post-Communist societies. Both authors had had experience of interviewing in different settings in the Russian Federation: Laura Piacentini in men’s penal colonies and Judith Pallot in marginal rural settlements. In researching men’s prisons Laura had felt disempowered by the sexual politics she encountered and was acutely aware of how her ‘otherness’ as a woman and as a Westerner was continually being reinforced. Nevertheless, when it came to her conversations with prisoners and personnel, she found her ‘outsider status’ a help in encouraging people to speak frankly, since there could be no suspicion that she was working for the security services.17 Judith’s experience of taking interviews in marginal rural areas was altogether less complicated, and her ‘outsider’ status and gender were more a help than a hindrance, because her interview subjects were women and her foreigner status dispelled suspicions that she was a covert government inspector.18 Had the circumstances of the interviews in Riazan’ and Yavas been more relaxed, unmonitored and less structured, we are confident that we would have been able to perform the role of ‘trusted confidant’ as we had in other contexts.

Open-ended interviews with prisoners The interviews that were conducted by native Russians recruited to the project after the collapse of the collaboration with the Riazan’ Academy are the fundamental source of the materials we use in Part II of this book relating to current prisoners. A total of 31 interviews were conducted in four correctional colonies, including one for juveniles over an 18-month period in 2008–10.19 One colony (IK2) in Mordoviia in which the UK team had conducted interviews was revisited by the native Russian team, and a small number of the participants who had volunteered for our interviews volunteered again. The circumstances of the interviews differed in significant ways from those that had been conducted by the UK team. They did not take place in private, but there was only one other person present: a member of the prison staff who took no part in the interview. The interviews, which were recorded, were not time-limited and they lasted between half an hour and two hours. The interviewers were brought to the UK for planning sessions, which involved discussion of ethical issues, the purpose of the interviews, and the lines of questioning that were to be pursued in the light of the responses we had gathered in L’govo and Mordoviia. These discussions were extremely helpful, because the interviewers were able to bring their prior experience of conversations with prisoners to comment on the feasibility of some lines of enquiry. New topics that emerged from these discussions related to friendship and ‘family’ groups in prisons and childcare issues. We refocused existing lines of questioning to encourage participants to talk more about their personal experiences of incarceration. The

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new interviewers were not ‘trained’, in the sense of having taken courses on qualitative methods and ethnographic interviewing, but they had the advantage of being empathetic interlocutors, native speakers, and well-acquainted with the inside of Russian penal colonies. Effectively, they took the interviews that we should have liked to take. Here is how a conversation (again reproduced from a verbatim transcript) developed around the question of distance with one prisoner incarcerated in her home town in northern Russia: Q. Masha, tell me, please: here you are serving your sentence practically next door to your home in your native city. Tell me, the fact that you are in your own town, does that help emotionally and psychologically? What do you think? A. It’s easier. Q. There must be women, probably, even though they are from this region, whose homes nevertheless are several hundred kilometres away? A. It’s easier for them too. It isn’t just a question of the material support relatives can give or the fact that it’s easier for the relatives. Actually, even though I live here, my Dad has to travel a really long distance to see me and has to send parcels by post. No, that’s not what it’s about. It’s simply that emotionally it’s easier. It’s emotionally easier that you are in prison in a familiar place. You know, they bring transports with women who don’t even know where [this town] is. We have women here from A______ and B_______. They can’t even imagine where this town is, and what sort of place it is. They know it’s somewhere way up in the north, but where in the north they have no idea. Yes, for them it’s very difficult, they don’t understand anything, it’s as if they’ve arrived in a foreign country. Q. So it’s not just about their relatives being a long way away? A. Yes, they think they are in a strange land. But for us locals it’s easier, we understand each other. I don’t know how best to explain it but we have our ways of doing things, we talk about the same thing, we’re like relatives. They are foreign; so it matters, this way of life.

The differences between this interview and the one we described above taken by the UK team in IK2 is striking: the participant’s responses are fuller, she is encouraged to expand on her short response to the initial question, and the conversation is not interrupted. Although in both interviews the women reveal their, as it turns out diametrically opposite, feelings about ‘knowing the place beyond the walls’ of the prison, in the second interview the participant has the confidence to embellish her answer and, in doing so, gives us a valuable sub-text about the relationship between women prisoners from different geographical regions. This theme surfaces in different places in the native-speaker interviews with prisoners and with ex-prisoners, which we discuss in Chapter 9. The fortuitous interviewing of the same women prisoners by the UK team and native Russians in IK2, albeit a year later, underlined the degree of restraint and caution exercised by the participants in the first set of interviews. But, at the same time, it was gratifying that there was consistency in the general tenor of the stories they told. We were assisted in our analyses of the interviews by being provided by the interviewers with a biographical sketch of each participant and a description of

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her demeanour during the interview. Years of working with women prisoners meant that the interviewers were sensitive to the performance aspect of interviews and could detect when they were being ‘played’ by interview participants. The interviews usually consisted of an exchange of ideas about a series of topics between interviewer and respondent in which the subject position of the interviewer was revealed. In what we should like to interpret as payback (none of the participants received material reward for their participation), the interviewers occasionally gave advice on matters to do with the law, writing appeals, and family welfare rules to prisoners. Only in a few cases did they appear to step ‘over the mark’ by making judgemental comments when discussing personal matters. Recruiting native Russian interviewers to the project not only produced deeper ‘in-depth’ interviews than we had been able to take, but, importantly, it broadened the character of the participants beyond those who were known by the administration to be trustworthy. It would be wrong, however, to take from this that the circumstances of the interviews did not affect the nature of the responses. The very fact of gaining access to interview women in colonies requires a positive relationship with the penal authorities of which the prisoner participants would be aware, whilst the presence of an officer, whatever the efforts to render her invisible, must have shaped the performance aspect of the interview. It was also obvious, but not necessarily a function of the circumstances in which the interviews were taken, that there were certain subjects where the women’s responses drew upon rehearsed accounts. These were when women talked about their offending behaviour and their understanding of the aims of re-socialization. It is striking, also, that the vocabulary used by the women was relatively free of prison jargon, swear words, and colloquialisms, and that whilst they did not hold back from criticizing the penal service, the court system, what had happened to them on remand or during transportation, when it came to talking about the colony, they avoided personalizing their criticisms. In this latter respect their interviews stand in stark contrast to those with ex-prisoners.

Guide interviews with ex-prisoners The final set of prisoner interviews we use in this book were taken by the Region research group with women who had been released from penal colonies. The interviews were taken in January and February 2009, with three followed up. A variety of avenues were used to recruit participants: through the research group’s existing networks, voluntary and publicly-funded social organizations, and the militia. The majority had been released within five years of the interview, although they included women who had been out of prison for considerably longer than this. The interviewers were sociologists and ethnographers who had experience of using a range of qualitative research methods. They had plenty of recent experience of working with marginal social groups.20

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As with the researchers described in the previous section, the leaders of the Region team visited the UK for a planning session prior to the fieldwork, during which ethical issues, the recruitment criteria for participants, and the feasibility of using less structured interviews than we had used with current prisoners were discussed. It was decided that guide-interview approach was the most appropriate format, as this would ensure that the same general areas of information were collected from each participant whilst still allowing a degree of freedom and adaptability. In the event, some were a hybrid between guide- and more conversational-type interviews. Notwithstanding these instances, the interviewers did set out with a list of agreed themes that we wished to be covered. More than the previous interviews, the themes raised with ex-prisoners were divided temporally into the period before arrest, during incarceration, and after release, with the greatest attention paid to the second of these. The themes included most of those that had been used in the interviews with existing prisoners on colony life, but also addressed the issue of re-socialization post-release and the participants’ retrospective thoughts about their period in prison. The ex-prisoners were more nervous about participating in the survey than current prisoners, and needed extra reassurances about maintaining anonymity (we accordingly do not name the cities in which the interviews took place or the colonies in which sentences were served). The reassurance the participants received from the interviewers is reflected in the evident frankness with which they recount their experiences in Russia’s penal colonies and in the language they used. Typically, the participants of the guided and conversational interviews responded to questions with multi-layered talk that ranged widely over topics and was peppered with prison jargon. Their talk was also highly personal, about themselves, other women prisoners, staff, and family, friends, and acquaintances, and illustrated by references to specific instances. Here is one prisoner talking about the laundry problem in her colony. We pick up her words at the end of a long complaint about the restrictions the colony imposed on the content of parcels from home which did not allow shampoo in opaque bottles: I NTERVIEWEE : It wasn’t anything to them that good shampoos are generally not in transparent bottles. The water there was contaminated with rust. Of course, this made a nasty deposit in the women’s hair. You can’t get a comb through because your hair was like straw, unless you could put balsam on it. And other cosmetics—you were allowed one cream for the face, one for the hands, and one for feet. And only in tubes. They didn’t let you have anything else in the cosmetic line. They decided on that only recently. It was the head of the OB. I NTERVIEWER : OB – Internal Security? I NTERVIEWEE : Uh-hu. She forbade everything. Even though as a woman herself she should understand what it’s like. But no way. Then they removed her as head of the OB, and they suddenly allowed everything. It seems there had been complaints. Lots of them. Here’s an example: they gave each of us a uniform to wear, a jacket and trousers that you had to wear all the time, at work, at the line-up, inside. And it wasn’t important to them that you had just one set of clothes and you might be working all day with wool wadding or, even better,

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fibreglass. It didn’t worry them at all, that we needed to wash our clothes, then dry them, and there wasn’t anywhere to dry them, there was just one small drying room per detachment. And if you dried them outside, the wind blew away the hangers. So there was nowhere to dry your things. Anyway in the summer they turned off the heaters. It was really important to have somewhere to dry your clothes. Most important, where were you going to dry your things? And then they’d write a report on you if you didn’t look neat. INTERVIEWER: Ahuh, how did you solve the problem? INTERVIEWEE: We’d steal material from the factory, and sew ourselves a second uniform. It looked a bit different but that didn’t matter. We were lucky that in our detachment we had women who worked in the cutting sections and we were able to make a deal with them; so she’d cut out enough for two uniforms and then you’d sew one for her and one for you . . .

In this fragment from a lengthy interview the participant is given space to talk about an issue that clearly troubled her in the colony and that we had not specifically highlighted in guide topics. As it turned out, hygiene surfaced in many of the interviews with ex-prisoners and alerted us to an important aspect of the biopolitics of Russian women’s correctional institutions. But the narrative raises other issues as well that we had been unable to pursue in the interviews with current prisoners. For example, contrary to personnel’s insistence of women prisoners’ passivity compared with men, women do challenge penal authority albeit by everyday forms of resistance such as stealing cloth. Reciprocity and barter (‘I will make a uniform for you if you obtain the cloth for me’) emerges as part of the survival repertoire. And, where identity is concerned, the insistence on a common gender identity with prison officers (‘they should understand a woman’s hygienic needs as they too are women’) can be seen as a means of resisting ‘othering’ and transcending the formal categories of ‘captor’ and ‘captive’. A particular value of the ex-prisoner interviews is that they made unexpected linkages between space, penal power and identity, and they allowed us to explore analytically topics that were largely absent from the talk of other interview participants. These included sexual relationships, the social ordering of life in the detachment (dormitory) blocks, attitudes to personnel, corruption and the importation of illegal goods and substances, violence and internal colony discipline and punishment. Among the ex-prisoners were those who had been given leadership roles in their colony, ‘trouble-makers’, and those who had been the victims of bullying and exploitation. They were a more varied group in terms of their experiences than the current prisoners, and they were prepared to describe their experiences from their different subject positions. The result is a rich source of very individual narratives in which the women’s voices are clearly heard. In the case of these ex-prisoners we have the full interview recordings, so have been able to check these against the transcriptions. The transcription process used by Region did not produce the level of detail that would be found in conversation analysis, but they are less ‘tidied up’ than the transcripts of the current prisoner interviews. They include irregularities of talk, such as pauses, repetition, restarts, and expressive emotions such as laughter.

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Analysis and presentation of the results of qualitative enquiry Inevitably, the question of the representativeness of interviewee participants in the interviews arises. In Table 2.1 we compare our ‘samples’ with data from a census of prisoners conducted by the penal service which includes returns for 50 per cent of all women in correctional colonies on the day of the census in 2009. The table shows that, compared with the overall population of women prisoners (which excludes those on remand), serious offenders were over-represented and women convicted of drug-related offences under-represented in our interview groups. This is reflected in the longer than average sentences in our groups. The opposite is the case where the ex-prisoners were concerned. The very different circumstances of each set of interviews that we have described above and the contrasting meaning they convey of women’s carceral experience should be sufficient to dispel any notion that it is our intention to treat the talk of the women as accurate truth statements. Rather, we treat their talk as stories articulated at a particular time and to a specific interviewer. The participants in the interviews were engaged in a reflexive identity project that, following Stephanie Taylor, could be considered in discursive terms as ‘a negotiation of multiple and conflicting versions, projections and possibilities’.21 In short, the responses to questioning cannot be taken as straightforward reflections of events and experiences. This is not just for the reasons we have mentioned above: that the circumstance of the interviews might constrain frank talk or be used instrumentally by participants, but because they involve a re-versioning of events and experiences. Table 2.1. Characteristics of the current women prisoners and former prisoners interviewed for the research project (compared with FSIN 2009 census population) Criminal characteristics of respondents Average age

Current prisoners1

Ex-prisoners 20092

34.0 35.2 Article of the criminal code under which convicted (in %) Murder (art. 105) 33.3 18.8 Premeditated bodily harm (art. 111) 12.5 4.5 Illegal trade in narcotics and 25.5 36.4 psychotrophic substances (art. 228) Theft (art. 158) 6.2 13.6 Robbery (arts 161,162) 10.4 13.6 Others 12.1 13.1 Length of sentence Average length of sentence 8.0 5.0 (in years rounded up) Percentage with sentences 27.0 9.0 of >10 years 1

FSIN census 20093 34.2 20.0 12.8 33.7 16.2 8.6 8.7 5.4 5.9

Sixty-five prisoners interviewed between 2007 and 2009. Twenty-four former prisoners interviewed in 2009. 3 Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika), (Iurispru dentsiia: Moscow, 2011), pp. 11, 22. The census was taken of one in every two women prisoners serving custodial sentences between 12 and 18 November 2009. 2

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In this respect, all our participants were ‘unreliable narrators’. In the case of the ex-prisoners this re-versioning of events and identities was complicated further by the distance the women had travelled since they were in prison; their retrospective narratives had been honed by retellings and were subject to a wide array of the influences they encountered once through the prison gates, including other people’s telling of ‘the prison story’ and the expectations of their varied audiences. The apparently contradictory accounts in the following pages of the experiences of women in prison may reflect objective differences between colony A and colony B, but they are as likely to reflect the different situational and subject positions of the interview participants. The three sources that we have described above are obviously very different and each could form the basis of a stand-alone analysis. The decision to bring them all together in this book was not a decision that was taken lightly; the pages of transcribed interviews run into multiples of hundreds. Among the consequences of this decision is that we abandoned initial plans to explore the women’s troubled identities through narrative analysis of the stories they told us and to analyse patterns of re-socialization post-release. Against this we have the advantages of triangulation which, given the constraints involved in taking the interviews, enhance the confidence we have in the credibility of our findings. Our approach was to search for patterns across multiple interviews in the larger body of interview data. We used Nvivo8 to help us manage the large body of qualitative materials that we had gathered. Because of the number of transcribed interviews, we based our codes on a joint reading of a sample of transcripts from each of the three sources. In approaching the first reading of the interviews we looked for statements that spoke to our broad research interests, but we tried to clear our minds of the question schedule used in interviews. In presenting the prisoners’ words in the chapters that follow we have used a simple classification and notation of the participants. These are as follows: prisoner (Pr), ex-prisoner (Ex-Pr), juvenile prisoner (JP), and interviewer (I). We rejected the idea of using pseudonyms because of its implication that the author is making claims about a unitary actor behind the talk, and because, in the English-speaking world, Russian names have social assumptions embedded in them. We give the year in which the interview was conducted and, where relevant to the argument, biographical details about the respondent which may include her sentence, how much of her sentence she has served, marital status, age, and so on. We do not reveal in which penal colony or city the interviews were taken, although we do indicate, again where relevant, the type (correction colony or open prison) and locational characteristics (whether in a metropolitan centre, accessible or remote rural region). These decisions reflect the fact that neither the individual prisoner nor correctional colonies are the units of analysis. A list of participants with their age, length of sentence, and article they are sentenced under is in Appendices I and II. Analysis of the transcripts also required us to address the challenges of multiple ‘translations’—the culturally-embedded concepts and language of Russian prisons— into a form intelligible for an English-speaking audience. Like the other methodo-

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logical challenges we faced, these are complicated issues which deserve a chapter in their own right. We tackled the problem of the lack of equivalence in meanings between Western and Russian prison cultures by making liberal use of our contacts in Russian prison NGOs to ensure that we properly understood the context in which meanings were incubated. Wherever non-equivalence proved to be a problem we have confined ourselves to translating concepts, rather than individual words. This means that the extracts we have included in the chapters that follow are those where there is an equivalent in British/Western culture or where meanings can been grasped by careful contextualization. Even so, we have been engaged in a process of approximation, re-invention, re-arranging, and re-creation both to clarify meanings for the audience and for the sake of readability. We have had to make fine decisions about how or whether to translate into the English language the prisonspecific language, including the prison argot. Some examples can be used to demonstrate the issues. Russian correctional colonies organize prisoners into large collective groups that share living space (usually a mass dormitory). The space and the collectivity of people that occupy it are referred to as the otriad, or detachment. In writing about these collectivities we had the choice of finding an equivalent that made sense in the UK context, such as wing or block (although conceptually these are different beings from the otriad), using the Russian original, or its translation, ‘detachment’. We opted for the last because, although it does not initially resonate with a foreign audience, its use acts as a reminder of the militarization of penal space. We have tried to keep the use of Russian to a minimum, reserving it for cases where there really is no suitable equivalent. In translating prisoners’ talk we have faced even greater problems of equivalence. Again, we have had to exercise judgement over how far to tidy up talk in order to make the meaning of the original intelligible, and, where prison jargon is concerned, when to use literal translation rather than English-language equivalents. As an example, prisoners refer to personnel as musor (garbage) or menti (cops); the choice we had was whether to use the translations or the English-language equivalent—‘screw’. We opted for the latter. In contrast, we use the literal translation of grib as ‘mushroom’, the name given by prisoners to a woman occupying the lowest rung in the prison social hierarchy, since the equivalents that exist in the English language are not widely known. Our aim in making these decisions has been to remain true to the meanings that the original vocabulary conveyed, avoiding the trap of exoticizing our subjects, so that their meanings ‘read naturally, are written in common grammar, idioms and words’.22 Even though the extracts may in some places read clumsily, we believe that we have remained true to the meaning of the women’s talk, and occasionally have succeeded in conveying some sense of their original expressiveness.

Other interviews In addition to interviews with prisoners we held interviews also with penal personnel, with inhabitants of rural settlements contained within and neighbouring

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penal zones, and with members of prison reform NGOs. As with the prisoner interviews, there were different interview teams. Altogether 30 interviews were taken with prison staff and 90 with local inhabitants living in Zubovo-Polianskii rural district, the site of the Mordovan penal complex, including key officials in the local government administration. These latter were taken by the team from the Riazan’ Academy and Region. The UK interviews were with prison personnel in IK2, IK14, and KP8 in Mordoviia. The interviews were carried out collectively, without the presence of one of the Riazan’ Academy colleagues, and, in all but one case, were recorded. These were supplemented by interviews taken by an independent Russian researcher in four colonies in which interviews with prisoners took place in 2008–9. The personnel interviewed were all of officer rank. The questions were designed to clarify local policy with respect to the issues that we had identified as relevant to prisoners’ experience of Russia’s penal geography and to probe the participants’ attitude towards them. In short, we were interested to know whether issues raised by prisoners were also problematized by prison staff and the extent to which sensitivity to that issue was incorporated into their management practices. The broad questions, accordingly, concerned gender, distance, visitation, and practice and policy in relation to supporting family relationships, interpersonal relationships in the colony, early release procedures and practices, and preparation for re-entry. Every interview began with an invitation to the officer to describe her or his professional history and the nature of the job in the colony. Prison personnel were less inhibited in their conversations with the UK team members than were the prisoners, which we put down to their clearer understanding of our purpose (all had completed higher education courses and were familiar with the procedures of academic enquiry) and to the fact that we had already met some of them prior to the interviews. Unlike the responses of the prisoners to our questions, personnel expressed a wide range of different, and often conflicting, views, which we took as evidence that they had not been primed on what was the correct answer (as with the prisoner interviews, we had had to submit a list of topics we wished to pursue in advance) and we were able to follow up points that were raised by the participants and introduce topics not on the ‘approved list’. Nevertheless, it was obvious to us that the formal setting of a recorded interview did result in some guarded responses, and this was confirmed by one of the native Russian interviewers who commented that the emphasis in on- and off-record views expressed by one officer she interviewed, and whom she had known for several years, diverged substantially. In addition to the formal interviews with colony personnel, the UK team was also given the opportunity to interview the head or Nachal’nik of three penal colonies (L’govo juvenile colony in Riazan’, and IK2 and IK14 in Mordoviia) as well as the overall head of the Mordoviian regional penal authority, MajorGeneral V. Mal’kov. These interviews were not recorded, and with the exception of the latter’s which took the form of a mini-lecture on the regional penal authority’s most recent innovations in women prisoner management, the others

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were conversations that involved an exchange of ideas about Russian and UK prison policy and practices. To gain the fullest possible picture of the impact of Russia’s penal geography, it was important to investigate the correctional colonies in which women are incarcerated in their local setting. In the original timetabling of the fieldwork, the interviews with local inhabitants and local government officials were scheduled to follow the interviews in the penal colonies; but in the event, rescheduling when we arrived in the region meant that we had to hand over the interviews with local inhabitants to Riazan’ Academy collaborators. These interviews were, again, supplemented by further fieldwork by Region, which in 2008 conducted interviews with 60 inhabitants of villages on a transect from villages located in the cluster of penal colonies to the outer border of the greater rural district, taking in the district capital (Zubova Poliana). The focus of the interviews with local residents was on the nature of the interdependencies and ‘co-community’ that exist with the penal colonies and their attitudes towards past, present and future involvement with the colonies, including with the people confined within. The results of these interviews are used in Chapter 4. The interviews with prison personnel and local residents speak to a variety of topics within prison sociology and ‘carceral geography’, but for the purposes of this book they have been mined primarily for the information they contain about the context of prisoners’ experience of Russia’s penal geography. In analysing these sets of interviews, therefore, we were less interested in excavating their embedded ‘meanings’ than in reconstructing patterns of behaviours and shared attitudes that have a bearing on our primary subjects. Whereas with the prisoner interviews it sometimes was important to refer back to the person behind the talk, this was not a part of the analysis of the ‘other’ interviews.

Quantitative enquiry Contextual information was also provided by questionnaire surveys that generated numerical data suitable for the production of descriptive statistics. These were of two target populations: prisoners and residents of penal regions.

Questionnaire surveys of women prisoners Three questionnaire surveys were administered in correctional colonies: two in colonies for juvenile offenders, in 2006 and 2010; and one in two colonies for adults, in 2007. The first, 2006, survey was administered by penal personnel under the supervision of Riazan’ Academy partners as one element of the pilot investigation of the L’govo juvenile colony. The sample was drawn from a population of 376 prisoners held in the colony at that time, and they consisted of juvenile offenders aged 14–18 years, and adults aged 18–21 years who occupied two separate detachments and had been permitted to stay in L’govo because they were due to be

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released before their 21st birthday. The sample size was large, 146, but we were unable to ascertain what sampling frame was used or to verify whether it included all categories of prisoner. Still, the 39 per cent sample size gave us some grounds for confidence in its representativeness of prisoners’ socio-economic attributes. The L’govo survey proved to be essential to the drafting of the questionnaire for adult colonies, highlighting the phrasing of questions that elicited poor or ambiguous responses and themes that needed amplification by the addition of further questions. We were also able to include questions in the adult survey that had surfaced in the interviews with the girls in the colony; these included questions about rehabilitation, work, family status, and childcare and included a number of open questions about, for example, re-entry plans and expectations of life after prison. The adult questionnaires were administered in two colonies, IK2 and IK14 in the Mordoviian penal region, in the week prior to our arrival. There was a 94 per cent response rate to the surveys, which were distributed to 150 prisoners. With a background population that we surmised to be in the region of 2,000 in the two colonies, this gave a sample size of 7.5 per cent. In 2010 we were also presented with the opportunity of conducting a small questionnaire survey of 40 prisoners in Novyi Oskol juvenile girls colony in Southern Russia. This survey included questions about trust (to whom the respondents would turn for various types of help) in the colony and more explicit questions than we had included in previous questionnaires about the respondents’ feelings about the location and geographical setting of the colony.

Local resident surveys The interviews conducted with local residents by the Academy research partners and Region were supported by quantitative surveys that were designed to construct a picture of the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the population of Zubovo-Polianksii rural district, home to the Mordoviian penal complex, and to test attitudes towards the developing links with the penal institutions. Two questionnaire surveys were conducted, in 2007 and 2008, with a sample size of 150 and 500 respectively. The unit of study in the surveys was the household. The aim was to find households belonging to three categories: those in which one or more members currently or previously worked in the penal service; those that had one or more members who were currently incarcerated or had previously served a carceral sentence in one of the Mordoviian colonies; and those who had no connection with the penal institutions.23 Every respondent to the surveys was asked for ‘biographical’ details of their household and its principal and supplementary sources of income, including the product of household plots, and a series of questions that sought to elicit the attitudes and relationship of the individual respondent to the penal complex. As with the local residents’ interviews, the questionnaire surveys were taken on a transect from Yavas in the heart of the penal complex to the southern boundary of the rural district, c.80 kilometres away, and included different sizes

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and functional settlement types. These included Zubova Poliana, the district capital; two ‘settlements of urban type’, Umet and Pot’ma (the former without a correctional colony and the latter the site of a transit prison and men’s colony); and small settlements which grew up either around penal institutions or lay outside the penal complex. The questionnaires were administered in person; the respondents were chosen by doorstep cold-calling, continuing until the target numbers for each category of settlement had been reached.

Published quantitative sources Compared with other jurisdictions, the Russian penal authorities place relatively little statistical information in the public arena. We have already observed in Chapter 1 the difficulty of accessing a time series of statistics relating to the number of adult and juvenile women on remand and in prison, but this difficulty extends to other categories of prisoner and to questions considered sensitive by the penal service. One such sensitive question is the distribution of prisoners by correctional colony and by region. In order to reconstruct Russia’s penal geography, as presented in Chapter 3, we have therefore had to draw on disparate sources and to use synthetic indicators, including data collated by prisoner support groups, human rights NGOs, journalists, and other unofficial and official sources published on the internet. We discuss the methodology and sources we employed in that chapter. The most useful source of quantitative data about Russia’s prison population is a series of special censuses carried out at irregular intervals since the1920s. The first, taken in 1926 and confined to convicted prisoners in the Russian Republic, for obvious reasons, was not repeated until 1970, long after the gulag had been officially dissolved. The methodology used in this census has informed subsequent censuses that have been taken at more or less 10-yearly intervals and their results published; that is, they record the socio-demographic and ‘criminal-correctional’ characteristics of a sample of prisoners incarcerated in a given time period in different types of penal institutions in the USSR. In the post-Soviet period, there have been two censuses: one in 1999, published in two volumes under the editorship of the late A. S. Mikhlin;24 and one in 2009. This recent census samples 10 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women prisoners, and the results have been published in a series of monographs concerned with different categories of prisoner under the general editorship of V. I. Seliverstov. In this book we have used monographs relating to women prisoners and to prisoners on remand.25 The purpose of the censuses is to provide a snapshot of Russia’s penal population at a particular point in time, but there are drawbacks: whilst they follow normal procedures for data gathering, typically for statistics relating to security matters, the censuses do not include absolute figures. Rather, all results are presented as averages and percentages, which limits the scope for examining relationships between the phenomena recorded. Nevertheless, we have been able to use the census results to make general comparisons between our own data and national trends.

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Multiple triangulations and reflexivity The changing circumstances of data gathering described in this chapter demanded a high degree of flexibility and reflexivity on our part. Apart from having to make radical adjustments to our original research design and methodology(ies), we also had to compensate for possible sources of ‘error’ in the materials we gathered. These latter hazards were potentially considerable. At every stage of the data gathering process there were potential shortcomings associated with the procedures for accessing materials. These included the possibility of the pre-selection of interview participants, bias in the conduct of interviews, our inability to ascertain the nature of sampling frames used in surveys, and, in certain cases, our lack of control over the production of transcripts and databases. But we discounted the possibility that the results had been deliberately falsified at some stage between their production and our receipt of them. Naturally, ethical questions arose in relation to interview participants and social survey respondents, where we had to rely upon reassurances given that the procedures for gaining informed consent we had discussed were followed. Ultimately, the guarantee of anonymity and confidentiality of the participants in interviews and surveys, insofar as the broader public is concerned, lies with us. We have been scrupulous on both these counts, but we are aware that in a penal context with a prison officer present, ‘confidentiality’ is a meaningless concept. We can only say in our defence that in the Russian system this is the condition of any research, whether or not it involves foreigners. We were careful, furthermore, where the prisoner interviews were concerned that none of our lines of questioning were on sensitive subjects or were such that they invited criticism of the officers or the local regime. The more serious ethical question, where there was potential for adverse consequences, was in our recruitment of substitute field researchers when the collaboration with the Riazan’ Academy broke down. We gave our new research partners a full and frank account of how the earlier collaboration had failed and what we understood the current status of our project to be, to allow them to make a decision about helping us in the possession of full knowledge of these circumstances. The concerns that we had about the integrity of our research methods, and consequentially of the materials gathered, convinced us of the inadvisability of relying on a single source. ‘Methodological triangulation’ (the use of different, normally qualitative and quantitative methods to generate data) was built into our original research design, but the use of ‘interviewer’ triangulation (where different interviewers are used to gather information from the same source) had been forced upon us. As portrayed in standard research methods texts, the principal advantage of triangulation is that it acts as a check on the reliability of sources, and we have used it in this cross-checking way to try to control for the different circumstances of the interviews; but we also approach triangulation more dialectically, welcoming the contrasts and contradictions between what our sources seem to tell us to add a sense of richness and complexity to our enquiry. In this respect our position is more akin to social constructionism than to realism.

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A disadvantage of opting for the multiple-source approach is that it has stretched the length of time between data gathering and the writing of this book, since every source had to be analysed and the results of that analysis brought to bear on our research question before we felt confident to commit the findings to paper. One possible negative consequence of this we have had to consider is that the story we have to tell is out of date, a threat that apparently increased with the announcement of thoroughgoing prison reforms to be implemented by 2020. However, we are reassured (but not comforted) by the thought that the lesson of Russian history is that even the best thought out changes are invariably frustrated by a combination of institutional structure, powerful interests, and resource constraints. In subsequent chapters we discuss the prospects for reform meliorating some of the problems that we explore.

Notes 1. Kafka, F., In the Penal Colony (first published 1914; this edn Penguin: London, 2011), p. 20. 2. See, for example, Carlen, P., Women’s Imprisonment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); idem, ‘Why study women’s imprisonment? Or anyone else’s?’ British Journal of Criminology, 34 (1994), pp. 131–9; ‘Carceral clawback: the case of women’s imprisonment in Canada’, Punishment & Society, 4/1 (2002), pp. 115–21; Hannah-Moffat, K., ‘Moral agent or actuarial subject: risk and Canadian women’s imprisonment’, Theoretical Criminology, 3/1 (1999), pp. 71–94; Kruttschnitt, C. and Vuolo, M., ‘The cultural context of women prisoners’ mental health: a comparison of two prison systems’, Punishment & Society, 9/2 (2007), pp. 115–50; Liebling, A., Suicides in Prison (London: Routledge, 1994). 3. Worrall, A., Offending Women: Female Lawbreakers and the Criminal Justice System (London: Routledge, 1990); Chesney-Lind, M. and Pasko, L., The Female Offender: Girls, Women and Crime (London: Sage, 2004). 4. Carlen (2002), op. cit., p. 116. 5. Kruttschnitt and Vuolo,op. cit.; McIvor, G. and Burman, M., Understanding the Drivers of Female Imprisonment in Scotland (Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research: Glasgow, 2011). 6. See Hannah-Moffat, op. cit., for comparisons with Canada. 7. For an application of their concept to Hong Kong, see Gray, P. ‘Women’s experiences of incarceration in Hong Kong: doing time, doing choice, doing class-gender-culture’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 34/2 (2006). 8. Nagar, R. and Ali, F., ‘Collaboration across borders: moving beyond positionality’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24/3 (2003), pp. 356–72. 9. Liebling, A., Prisons and their Moral Performance: A Study of Values, Quality and Prison Life (Oxford University Press: Oxford), p. 133. 10. This included strained UK–Russian relations following the Litvinenko affair (the poisoning of a former KGB officer in London with polonium-210, which caused a diplomatic crisis between the UK and the Russian Federation beginning in November 2006) and forced closure of British Council offices in the provinces (December 2007), political recentralization during Vladimir Putin’s second presidential term, the tightening up of rules governing relationships between government departments and foreign institutions, and complicated internal politics between centre and peripheries and conservatives and liberals of the penal and justice ministries. 11. Carlen, P. and Worrall, A., Analysing Women’s Imprisonment (Willan: Cullompton, 2004), p. 197. 12. In L’govo the interviews were conducted by Pallot and Piacentini, who were joined in Mordoviia by Dominique Moran.

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13. Agar, M., The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography (Academic Press: New York, 1996), p. 153. 14. Oliver, D. G., Serovich, J. M., Mason, T. L., ‘Constraints and opportunities with interview transcription: towards reflection in qualitative research’, Social Forces, 84/2 (2005), pp. 1273–89. 15. Agar, op. cit.; Carspecken, P. F., Critical Ethnography in Educational Research: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (Routledge: London, 1996); Charmaz, K., ‘Grounded theory: objectivist and constructivist methods’, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edn (Sage: London, 2000), pp. 509–35; Fairclough, N., Discourse and Social Change (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1993); Dijk, T. van, ‘Critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis’, Discourse and Society, 10 (1999), pp. 459–60. 16. Nagar, R., ‘Footloose researchers, travelling theories, and the politics of transnational feminist praxis’, Gender, Place and Culture, 9/2 (2002), pp. 179–86; Sultana, F., ‘Reflexivity, positonality and participatory ethics: negotiating fieldwork dilemmas in international research, ACME: an international e-journal for critical geographies, 6/3 (2007), pp. 3754–85. 17. Piacentini, L., Surviving Russian Prisons: Punishment, Economy and Politics in Transition, (Willan: Cullompton, 2004), p. 6. 18. Pallot, J. and Nefedova, T., Russia’s Unknown Agriculture: Household Production in Post-Socialist Rural Russia (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007), pp. 14–15. 19. The correctional colonies were located in different geographical settings. Importantly, they included colonies across the spectrum: from those that had been recently modernized and/or had been selected for innovating trials of the management of women prisoners, to those that had various deficits, such as the age and maintenance of the physical fabric or because of overcrowding. 20. Most notably as collaborators on a project researching youth cultures with Hilary Pilkington, University of Warwick. See Pilkington, H., Omel’chenko, E., Flynn, M., Bliudina, U., Starkova, E., Looking West: Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures (Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania, 2002); and Pilkington, H., Omel’chenko, E. and Garifzianova, A., Russia’s Skinheads: exploring and rethinking subcultural lives (Routledge: London, 2010). 21. Taylor, S., Narratives of Identity and Place (Routledge: London, 2010), p. 129. 22. Newmark, P., A Textbook of Translation (Pearson Educational: Harlow, 2004). 23. We were particularly interested in the households of former prisoners because, although ‘staying on’ in the region of incarceration was acknowledged during the Soviet period (as a result of residence permit rules and the enforced exile that often followed incarceration), no systematic surveys of the phenomenon have been published. In the event, neither survey team found this category of household, which was explained to us as due to the sensitivity of this topic in the re-telling of family histories. 24. Mikhlin, A. S., Kharakteristika osuzhdennykh k lisheniiu svobody. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi, 1999, vols. 1 and 2 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001). 25. Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011); Geranin, V. V., Podozrevaemye i obviniaemie, soderzhashchiesia v sledstvennykh izoliatorakh. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, Vypusk 7 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011).

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PART I Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

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3 The Historical Geography of Punitive Expulsion The dispatch in October 2005 of Mikhael Khordokovsky, the Russian oil magnate found guilty by a Russian court of corruption, to a penal colony 3,775 miles from Moscow is a reminder that sending people to the peripheries is a deeply sedimented response to deviancy in Russia. Khordokovsky’s was a special case; it was politically expedient for the Russian leadership to remove him as far from Moscow as possible.1 Most ‘ordinary’ prisoners are not sent such extreme distances. On the contrary, a stated aim of the current correctional code is for prisoners to serve their sentences in the region (oblast or republic) in which they were domiciled at the time of their arrest or where they made their last court appearance. The past two decades have, in fact, witnessed a marked improvement in performance in this respect. In 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, 41.3 per cent of all prisoners were sent out of their home region to serve their sentences. Twenty years on, a 2009 census of prisoners recorded 33.4 per cent of women and 17.7 per cent of men being sentenced to another region.2 The reduction has been achieved by more careful planning of prisoner placement, changes in the category of facilities to achieve a mix for each region, and by allowing capacities to be exceeded in the most accessible facilities. But the geography of the penal estate inherited from the Soviet era, when remote and difficult-to-access places were selected as sites for penal facilities, constitutes a formidable obstacle to further improvement. Even with a radical contraction in prisoner numbers, the costs involved in producing a penal estate that would make serious inroads into the distances that convicted prisoners have to be sent to serve their sentences is prohibitive, as has been admitted by the current head of the penal service.3 In this chapter we discuss how the current geographical distribution of penal facilities came about and what the history of its development says about the Russian approach to penality, understood as a system of social control that includes, but is not reducible to, punishments. Territorial strategies of social control have long been recognized as a technique of power relied upon by governments to control target populations or individuals.4 They include a variety of forms of exclusion, such as banishment, exile, quarantine, deportation, transportation, and resettlement, and they may or may not be linked to containment at the destination—in prisons, asylums, ‘pesthouses’, or detention centres. The best known examples are the sixteenth–nineteenth-century

48

Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

transportations by the European powers of convicts to West Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the Andaman Islands, with the concomitant founding of penal colonies on Norfolk Island, Van Diemen’s Land, Devil’s Island, and New Caledonia.5 Perhaps the most iconic in the history of this form of punishment were the transportations to Siberia and the North by successive Russian states that lasted from the sixteenth century to, as we argue here, the present time. Initially, in sixteenth-century Muscovy, expulsion—banishment (izganie) and exile (ssylka)—were not so much punishment as the consequences of punishment, since the political and religious dissidents and criminals to whom they were applied had usually already been tortured, mutilated, and interned. Exile as punishment emerged in the following century when it became linked to the task of realizing the state’s economic and strategic goals in Siberia. Prisoners exiled to Siberia could be sentenced to a period of hard labour, or katorga, which confined them to barracks; or alternatively they could be sentenced to exile ‘to settlement’, to work on the land or in service. In various guises these two forms of exile persisted into the nineteenth century and were to resurface in the twentieth century in the Soviet period, when they were used on an industrial scale. According to Andrew Gentes, historian of the Russian exile system, the twentieth-century extension of the system had been pre-visioned in the Speranskii reforms of the 1820s, which equipped Russia with an administrative structure and regulations that systematically exploited the labour of deportees and presaged the twentieth-century technocratic revolution that ‘saw people as machines’ and confirmed Siberia as Russia’s ‘multi-purpose prison.’6 Despite its ancient roots and the longevity of its use by some states, ‘regulation by exclusion’ (as it is theorized by Michel Foucault) is most often treated as a ‘transitional form’ of social control between sovereign punishment and disciplinary power. Accordingly, scholarship has tended to stress the instrumental dimension of expulsion and transportation in providing labour for colonial development, whilst neglecting its performative dimensions and symbolic associations. This is true for histories of transportation in Russia, both before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which have sought explanations in the state’s economic development plans and strategic goals.7 Recently, however, both the historical assumptions about territorial strategies of social control and the death it apparently suffered with ‘the birth of the prison’ have been challenged. Willis, for example, has related the persistence of transportation in late-eighteenth-century England to the development of powerful anti-state tendencies that attempted to contain the expansion of state power over the population as was represented by prison building.8 And Beckett and Herbert, using the example of the exclusion of the homeless from public spaces in Seattle, have made a convincing case for viewing current practices of socio-spatial exclusion as a form of banishment that can best be understood as punitive, despite the legal hybridity of the techniques employed to move people on. They call on students of punishment to expand their scholarly focus to include the multifaceted nature of the sanctioning process and, specifically, to recognize the (re)-emergence of spatial exclusion as a social control practice.9

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49

Expulsion and confinement in Russia’s history of penality in the twentieth century Students of the history of punishment in Russia should, in fact, be among the first to respond to a call to pay greater attention to spatial exclusionary processes, because the Russian state has never lost faith with its power as a tool of social control. Furthermore, as the abiding resonance of the archipelago metaphor, and its associated image of the gulag camp with its watchtowers, wooden fences, and barracks situated in a snowbound waste testifies, it has achieved an iconic cultural status in Russia that is no less powerful than the institution of the electric chair in the USA and the guillotine in France. However, even more than is the case with European scholarship on transportation, historians of Russia have been inclined to draw rigid boundaries and to insist on periodizations that obscure the continuities and multifaceted nature of punishment forms. Thus, of spatial regulation’s ‘two modalities’—expulsion and containment—the former has been emphasized in analyses of punishment in Imperial Russia and the latter has been emphasized in analyses of the gulag.10 Whilst the location of the majority of camps in the inhospitable geographical peripheries—necessitating long and painful journeys—figures in all accounts of the Soviet gulag, it is the labour camp—the place of confinement— that is understood as its defining feature, both as the site of extra-judicial punishments and as the fountain of the techniques of disciplinary control that embraced society in the carceral archipelago. Yet the use of spatial exclusion as a means of social control was no less integral to the Soviet system of penality than it was in Imperial Russia. This was expressed most obviously in the mass deportations that punctuated the whole period from 1930 to Stalin’s death: the deportation of kulaks or rich peasants during the collectivization drive, the deportation of ethnic groups suspected of Nazi collaboration during World War II, and the recently uncovered ‘mass operations’—a process of identification, registration, arrest, deportation, and resettlement targeting entire social strata—of the period of the Great Terror in 1937–8.11 Evidence from recently declassified archives indicates that such regulation by exclusion had its antecedents in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions and the 1920s, when forced migrations, internments, ethnic cleansing, and exile were used by late Imperial and early Bolshevik governments alike to cleanse potentially disruptive elements from cities. These measures were not used exclusively on political dissidents, but applied also to ‘ordinary criminals’—in the 1920s known recidivists were subject to pre-emptive banishment for periods of three years. In one measure that came to be known as the ‘minus six’, criminals and other potentially disruptive elements were debarred from living in the six most important Soviet cities; the secret police, given the task of implementing the measure, deposited the victims on the outskirts of secondorder towns. There was a further pre-emptive sweep of the major cities to cleanse them of ex-convicts, currency traders, NEPmen, and other undesirable elements in 1927/8, and 1928 also saw the removal of ‘dangerous elements’ such as beggars and hooligans from the gold-mining areas.12

50

Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

There are different explanations for each episode of twentieth-century ‘excisionary violence’: they were an attempt to pre-empt a fifth column, a consequence of internal political tensions between centre and the regions, or they were directed at solving particular administrative or economic tasks, such as ‘storming the heights’, colonizing the peripheries of the state, or providing labour for resource mobilization or construction.13 But taken together, they were part of a much larger state project to reshape the social composition of the centres of economic and political power. This elaborate and multifaceted system of spatial regulation did not end with Stalin’s death; deportations of target populations, albeit on a much smaller scale than in the 1930s and 40s, continued under Khrushchev. Exile remained in the repertoire of punishments up to the end of the Soviet period. There are celebrated cases of exile, such as the dissident Andrei Sakharov who was confined to the industrial city of Gorkii, but exile could be applied to anyone who fell foul of the criminal justice system and as a condition of release. It is true that, after Stalin’s death, exile and a sentence of custody resulting in transportation to one of the country’s remote labour colonies was now the consequence of the application of judicial process (although the imprisonment of political, religious, and nationalist dissidents and the use of psychiatric hospitals for detention were extra-legal by any normal definition). But the point we are making is that spatial exclusion as a strategy of social control remained central to the Russian and Soviet system of penality after Stalin’s death and was no less punitive for being legal. For the victims of these ‘gardening’ episodes who escaped summary execution, expulsion was often associated with confinement in designated parts of the country. The first place chosen was a genuine archipelago, the Solvetskii Islands in the White Sea. The choice of the Solovki (re)affirmed the principle of confining prisoners in the peripheries. From the beginning of the collectivization drive in agriculture and the launch of the first five-year plan to achieve a leap forward in Soviet industrialization in 1928, the role identified by the state for prisoners was to fill gaps in the workforce in places where ‘local conditions presented severe obstacles to labour recruitment’.14 Early plans also included provision for prisoners who had finished their sentences to be allocated land to settle locally. In a parallel development, places in the peripheries were earmarked to become settlements for the victims of the social and ethnic deportations; these special settlements (spetsposeleniia), soon to be renamed work settlements (trudposeleniia), were in truth little more than a stake in the ground in remote places that those deportees who had survived the journey had to turn into a place in which to live.15 Both labour colonies and work settlements were under the supervisory control of the NKVD. In a sense, then, the Imperial Russian distinction of exile to ‘settlement’ and to ‘hard labour’ continued; and, interestingly, there are echoes at the present time in that many correctional colonies (usually of the harshest regime) stand in the same place and sometimes occupy the same buildings as the gulag colonies, whilst the former exile settlements have over time been transformed into so-called colonysettlements (kolonii-poseleniia), currently the lowest category prisons.16

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51

The salient point of the system of camps and colonies that was created during the Stalin era is that even though there were few places that escaped being drawn into the gulag, it was peripheral locations that had the most prisoners. The gulag unfolded in space and time as camps were founded and dissolved according to the priorities of the latest five-year plan and following the expansion outwards of the resource frontier. We show this changing geography at http://www.gulagmaps.org, which plots the distribution of camps at two-year intervals from 1929 to 1960.17 In Figure 3.1 we have plotted the distribution of prisoners between major regions for an average year in the five years before Stalin’s death when the gulag reached its zenith.18 At the end of the 1920s the gulag consisted of a small number of camps in the north of the Urals, southern Siberia, and near the Chinese border in the Far East; but during the 1930s new camps were established in European Russia (including in Moscow) and in the north-west, near the Baltic coast, the Komi Republic and in Siberia. The 1940s saw both consolidation and expansion, as camps became embedded in these key penal regions, and as new areas were drawn into the gulag network. Camps expanded in Magadan oblast, further to the north on the Pacific coast, and in the Siberian northern republic of Sakha, as well as in the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan. After the death of Stalin and the amnesties that followed, a reshuffling of the remaining prisoners took place to regions that were selected to retain their penal function. From its 1950s sprawl, the gulag by 1960 had contracted back to some of the penal regions in which it had first developed. We show the distribution in Figure 3.2. The places selected to retain their penal function put down roots in the decades that followed, and they became a dominant presence in contiguous rural districts in regions stretching in an arc from the north of European Russia, through the non-Russian Volga republics into the Urals, and tapering into Siberia. Meanwhile isolated concentrations of penal colonies, much shrunken remnants of the gulag, remained on either side of this arc, including in more remote locations in the Far North and east of Siberia and in Kazakhstan. In sum, whilst the most remote outposts of the gulag shrivelled, regions on the peripheries of the ecumene continued to be used as places of imprisonment. These included such notable ‘islands’ of the archipelago as the south-western part of Mordoviia, which became notorious for the incarceration of dissidents in the 1960s, the Far North in European Russia, the Urals, and parts of Siberia. In the meantime camps were closed in the large metropolitan centres, including Moscow and Leningrad. Whilst the parties of convict labour that had been a visible feature of urban construction sites during the Stalin era gradually disappeared from the major towns, penal labour continued to be used in the service of the Soviet economy in the peripheries right up to the end of the Soviet period.19 There were three moments in the twentieth century when the Russian leadership had the opportunity decisively to break Russia’s tradition of confining people in penal institutions in the geographic margins. The first was in the 1920s when, as we described above, the concentration camps on the Solovestkii Islands were founded, the choice signalling a rejection of the metropolitan penitentiary that by

Numbers of prisoners in an average year

Camp administration With number of prisoners recorded With no record of prison population

0 1–10,000 10,001–50,000 50,001–100,000 100,001–200,000 200,001–300,000

Fig. 3.1. The distribution of prisoners by regions of the Russian Republic (RSFSR) for a single average year between 1949 and 1953.

Moscow Camp administration

Fig. 3.2. The distribution of labour camp headquarters in 1959–60 in the Russian Republic (RSFSR).

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Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

then had become a fixture in European states. Although there was a lot of Russia beyond the boundaries of large cities that could have accommodated a concentration camp, the place chosen was remote and hostile for human life. This, as we have seen, was to set the tone for what was to come. The second moment was when the penal architecture of Stalin’s gulag was dismantled following the dictator’s death in 1953. In making the decision about what should be done with people who henceforth fell foul of criminal law, it was obvious that, even in the conditions of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, abandoning incarceration as a sanction was not on the agenda; but nor was abandoning the practice of exile, as it transpired. It would have been possible to construct the post-Stalin prison system in metropolitan centres on the basis of the colonies that had been established in them to provide labour for large construction projects; but this alternative was not taken up. The third moment when the Russian leadership had the opportunity to break with the practice of confining people in the geographic margins was after 1991, when Communism collapsed and the USSR dissolved. The circumstances were propitious for change; the new post-Soviet government committed the country to prison reform and the pursuit of international best practice. Furthermore, it publicly distanced itself from its Soviet predecessors’ scant respect for human rights. The aim of bringing prisoners ‘closer to home’ was even included in the schedule of reforms. However, the obvious means of achieving that aim—the closure of the most remote penal colonies—was overlooked in all the reforms that followed. There have been incremental changes, as we observed in Chapter 1, but none has destabilized the fundamental spatial organization of the penal estate as it was at the end of the Soviet period. To underline this fact, the head of the Justice Ministry, Alexander Konovalov, admitted in 2009 that the gulag had yet to be expunged from the Russian penal system. ‘The principal task confronting us,’ he said in one of many interviews he gave in 2009 to launch the latest round of reforms, ‘is to change fundamentally the existing configuration of the criminal-correction system. It is necessary to remove the prison camp archipelago with all its attendant traditions and the principles of collectivism and labour.’20 He did not explain why it has taken two decades for the state to commit itself to doing this. There are, of course, ‘rational’ explanations for why at each of these moments the leadership was disinclined to embark on a fundamental restructuring of the penal estate, which we will not rehearse here. Rather, we wish to suggest that the tenacity with which successive Russian governments in the twentieth century hung on to the peripheries as a place of incarceration may also have a cultural explanation in a deep-rooted attachment to transportation and exile as a solution to the problem of social control. This predisposition in favour of ‘regulation by exclusion’, moreover, we would suggest, trumped alternative penal modernization strategies that might have been pursued. As a final comment to our argument about the continuity of transportation as a punishment form in Russia, we recognize that a full cultural analysis of the use of the peripheries as a place of incarceration would require the sort of analysis advocated by Philip Smith: that would attend to how punishment is discussed in popular culture, identify the myths and

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symbols attached to different punishment forms, and attempt to trace their roots in deeply embedded cultural codes.21 We leave this analysis to those more competent to do this than us. Our immediate purpose, with a specific historical context that we have described above as a frame, is to discuss the spatial character of the penal estate that exists in the Russian Federation today.

Russia’s penal geography today On the eve of the collapse of the USSR, there were between 1.3 and 1.6 million prisoners in various penal institutions, the majority in the Russian Republic. An immediate task associated with the creation of fifteen independent states was the repatriation of prisoners to their relevant sovereign states, a process which took place during the early 1990s. The prison population in the newly created Russian Federation hovered around 750,000 in the early 1990s, with an incarceration rate (number of prisoners per 100,000 population) of under 500; but thereafter the numbers began to rise to exceed one million in 1996/7, when, albeit for a brief period, Russia became the country with the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. Numbers fluctuated thereafter, but the overall trend has been downwards to 568 per 100,000 in 2008–11. Currently, the Russian Federation stands third in the world in terms of its incarceration rate, behind the USA and Rwanda.22 In Table 3.1 we show the penal institutions in which these prisoners are held. They are administered by FSIN and its territorial branches, or UFSINs (upravleniia federal’noi sluzhbi ispolneniia nakazania), one for each subject (oblast, or republic) of the Federation. The basic classification of prisons is into pre-trial facilities and correctional facilities for convicted prisoners sentenced to a period of incarceration. These latter are divided according to the severity of regime to which prisoners are sentenced, and there are, in addition, specialist facilities for prisoners suffering from TB and other infectious diseases, foreigners from ‘far abroad’ (that is, not including people from the former Soviet republics), juveniles, and former members of the security services. The official classification of penal institutions, in fact, masks a much ‘messier’ picture in which different categories of offender are held together in the same facility. Remand prisons normally hold a mixture of people of different ages, sex, citizenship, and health status; and typically they have a resident population of convicted prisoners who are awaiting the outcome of appeals or have been retained to service the facility. In men’s correctional colonies there can also be a variety of prisoners by category, as is the case in all women’s colonies in which prisoners are not differentiated. Each of the different types of penal facility described in the table has its own geography. Typically, pre-trial facilities are located in the metropolitan centres, and they are to be found in every oblast, and republic. Most regions also have at least one standard regime colony for men, although this does not imply that there is sufficient capacity to accommodate local ‘demand’. The distribution of facilities catering for

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Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

Table 3.1. Formal classification of penal facilities administered by FSIN in the Russian Federation, 2011 Abbreviation

Type and function of facility

Number (in April 2009)1

Sizo

Sledstvennii Izoliator Investigative isolator for people awaiting trial Vospitatel’naia Koloniia

225

VK

IK

K-P

Tiur’ma

LIU

1

Educational colony for juvenile offenders (now being re-named ‘educational centres’ – vospitatel’nie tsentri) Ispravitel’naia Koloniia Correctional colonies for adult offenders, comprising: Obshchii rezhim Minimum security colony for adult men and women General regime Strogii rezhim Medium to maximum security colony for men, including Strict regime first-time offenders convicted of particularly grave crimes, and repeat offenders who have previously served prison sentences. Osobii rezhim Maximum security colony for male offenders convicted of Special regime particularly dangerous repeat crimes, or who have been sentenced to life imprisonment Koloniia-Poselenie ‘Colony-settlements’, for male and female offenders given custodial sentences for minor offences, and other offenders nearing the end of their sentence Tiur’ma Prison: a maximum security facility for men with cellular or galleried accommodation Lechebnoe Ispravitel’noe Uchrezhdenic ‘Medical isolation colony’ for male prisoners with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases or requiring treatment for drug addiction

62 (of which 3 for girls)

758

138

7

68

www.fsin.su; www.prison.org [accessed 29 May 2009].

other categories of prisoner—men sentenced to the more severe regimes, women, juveniles, TB or AIDS sufferers, and other specialist categories—is less even between Russia’s regions. When these specialist facilities are taken together with the more ubiquitous standard regime colonies, the pattern of geographical distribution that emerges can be described as one of ‘dispersed concentration’, with particular places in the peripheries accommodating clusters of facilities. Russia’s geography of penality is, thus, uneven. The regions with clusters of institutions mark out the same arc as in late Soviet times. We refer to this as

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Russia’s penal heartland. As before, there are remote outliers in the Far North and eastern Siberia, whilst to the south and west most oblasti now have variable collections of facilities, reflecting the attempt in the past 20 years to achieve differentiated provision in every region. Nevertheless, greatest provision is in the penal heartland, which continues to receive prisoners from all over the Russian Federation. Valery Abramkin, founder of a leading prison reform NGO in Russia, in 1998 described the pattern of ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’ regions for Russia’s prisoners. The statistics he produced then showed an extraordinarily large gap in the rate of imprisonment in the central Russian oblasts, where there is the greatest density of population and economic potential, and in the more sparsely populated oblasts to the north and east.23 The extremes according to his calculations were Moscow city and oblast, where the imprisonment rate was 200/100,000 and the Komi Republic in the far north of European Russia, one of the original islands of the gulag, with a rate of 1,620/100,000. The list of regions with over 1,000 prisoners per 100,000 population for 1998 marked out the penal heartland and its remote outliers: Sverdlov, Irkutsk, Arkhangel’sk, Chita, the republic of Tyva, Kransoiarsk, Perm’, the Jewish autonomous oblast, and Mordoviia. The highest imprisonment rate for any oblast located in the populous and economically dynamic central region in European Russia was for Tula, lying south of Moscow, which with an imprisonment rate of 740/100,000 was under half that of Komi. As we have discussed elsewhere, ‘recipient’ regions like Komi with above average rates of imprisonment have been places of incarceration from the early years of the gulag.24 In such places, several generations of prison personnel have served the changing penal system and a certain type of penal patriotism has become sedimented alongside the physical infrastructure of the prison system. We describe this in Chapter 4. We have not been able to access the figures that would allow us to compare the imprisonment rates across the Russian Federation today with those of 1998, but bearing in mind the division of labour between remand and correctional facilities, and assuming more or less even crime and sentencing rates (dubious, but this is the best we can do), there is reason to believe that no serious inroads have been made into the pattern of donor and recipient regions that Abramkin described for 1998. Thus, Moscow city with ten remand prisons, which seems a not unreasonable number for a city of over 10 million, has no correctional institutions for convicted prisoners—not a single one.25 In contrast the Komi Republic, which topped the list for the rate of imprisonment in 1998, has 33 correctional colonies and three remand prisons. The supposition, confirmed by our conversations with NGOs and penal personnel in Russia, is that Moscow is still exporting its prisoners to other parts of the Russian Federation. The regions making up what we have described above as Russia’s penal heartland—Komi, Mordoviia, Krasnoiarsk, Perm’, Arkhangel’sk, and Sverdlov oblasts—together have 211 of the Russian Federation’s 758 correctional colonies, 28 per cent of the total. This compares with just 7.9 per cent for the ten regions that were at the bottom of the list for the rate of incarceration in 1998. The distribution of penal colonies between regions is only one element of the problematic geography of penality in Russia. Within regions, the distribution of

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Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

Kudymkar

Perm’

Correctional colonies for adult men: General regime Strict regime Special regime Correctional colonies for adult women Penal settlements (open prisons)

Prison hospitals Correctional colonies for former personnel of Russian security service Remand (pre-trial) facilities Juvenile colonies for boys Railways

Fig. 3.3. The distribution of all types of correctional facilities in Perm’ krai, 2008.

colonies enhances the isolation and invisibility of Russia’s prisoner population. FSIN does not produce data about the intra-regional distribution of colonies, but it has been possible to map the location of colonies from their postal addresses. Figure 3.3 is of Perm’ krai, a large region in UK terms, its north–south extent equivalent to the distance between London and Edinburgh. The figure shows that

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the majority of its colonies are concentrated in its northern hinterland, at distances of more than 300 kilometres from the regional capital. These include strict and special regime colonies for serious offenders, as well as colony-settlements at the other end of the spectrum. Other categories of prison, including for juveniles and women, are in more central locations. Remand prisons are located in the regional capital of Perm’ city and Kudymkar, the capital of the former Komi-Permiak autonomous oblast; in Solikamsk, the gateway to Perm’s vast penal hinterland; and in Kizel, the former centre of coal-mining using convict and German PoW labour in the 1940s. The consequence for prisoners of this distributional pattern is that a custodial sentence brings with it a high probability of transportation to a colony in a remote place, this probability increasing with the severity of sentence, although, somewhat bizarrely, it is also enhanced for people sentenced to colony-settlements. Among the other categories of prisoner that have a high probability of being sent long distances are women, and it is to them that we now turn.

Russia’s gendered geography of prisons In the conventional history of punishment in Imperial Russia, transportation, corporal punishment, and hard labour were quintessentially ‘male’ punishments, with women cast in the role of ‘accompanying persons’, even though they were sent to Siberia ‘in their own right’ in a ratio of 1:5. This mirrors the tendency in scholarship on transportations to the colonies from Europe to focus on women’s sexuality and behaviours rather than on their skills, as Oxley argues we should in her book on ‘convict maids’.26 Similarly, although women were sent to the same distant and environmentally challenging camps, the tendency in the general scholarship on the gulag is to focus on their relationships and sexuality.27 At some time between Stalin’s death and the present time, it was ruled that women should not be incarcerated in the Far North, which includes the Arctic. This means that women prisoners do not have to suffer the extreme climate of such regions, although we should note that the women and juveniles we interviewed who themselves came from northern places like Ukhta and Pechora, built by penal labour in the 1930s, bemoaned the fact that the state had not provided colonies in their home towns for women. Although women’s colonies are absent from the extreme peripheries of the Russian state, they are, nevertheless, ‘distant’ in the sense that the women incarcerated in them often come from other parts of Russia that are far away. Currently, the Russian Federation has 46 facilities for women concentrated in 37 ‘subjects of the Federation’ (against a total of 86), but these are not evenly spread in relation to the background population. Just under one half of all facilities (16 of the total) are concentrated in the Volga Federal region, with three of these clustered within a few miles of one another in the south-west corner of the Mordoviian Republic. Figure 3.4, which plots the distribution of colonies for juvenile and adult women, shows that the situation for juvenile women’s colonies is the least favourable, as there are only three in the whole country. As a consequence juvenile women have to endure

Correctional colonies for women: Juvenile Existing Planned conversions

Fig. 3.4. The distribution of adult and juvenile colonies for women in the Russian Federation, 2011.

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Table 3.2. The place of incarceration of different categories of prisoner in relation to where they were previously domiciled or stood trial, 1989–2009 Location of colony in relation to the place where prisoners were previously domiciled or stood trial

Year of census 1989

1994

1999

2009

Women In the same town or administrative district In the same subject of the Federation (oblasts, republic, krai), but not in the same town or administrative district In a different subject of the Federation (oblasts, republic, krai) Does not have a permanent place of residence Total

2009 Men

7.1 24.8

9.3 29.5

11.5 37.9

14.2 51.1

20.5 59.8

68.1

58.3

47.1

33.4

17.7

–

2.9

3.5

1.3

2.0

100

100

100

100

100

Source: 2009 FSIN census of Russian prisoners (1 in 10 men and 1 in 2 women): Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), p. 44.

particularly long transportations to reach their colonies, and once there they are separated by long distances from their families. It is this uneven distribution of colonies that explains why one-third of women, according to official statistics, are sent out of their ‘home’ region to serve their sentences. We have already observed that this is an improvement on the situation before the USSR’s collapse. As Table 3.2 shows, the greatest improvement in the placement of women took place in the first ten years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, but has slowed down since. It also shows that the situation for women has remained worse than for men. Figures 3.5 and 3.6 give a clearer indication of what these statistics mean in terms of the distances that women are taken to serve their sentences. The maps were produced from the results of the questionnaire surveys that we carried out in L’govo educational colony for girls in Riazan’ in 2006, and IK2 and IK14 for adult women in the republic of Mordoviia in 2007. They plot the permanent place of residence of the juvenile and adult women held in these colonies in those years. In the case of L’govo the ‘catchment’ from which juveniles are gathered into the colony embraces the whole of European Russia north of Riazan’ and east to Sverdlovsk and Kurgan in the southern Urals and West Siberia. This is a vast area consisting of 17 administrative regions. In 2006, the head of the L’govo colony confirmed to us that only three inmates were from Riazan’ oblast and under 20 per cent from neighbouring oblasts, including Moscow, a major source of prisoners. Calculating distances as the crow flies between regional capitals, 41.7 per cent of the prisoners in L’govo in March 2006 came from distances greater than 1,000 kilometres, 13.1 per cent from distances of 500 to 1,000 kilometres, with the average being 708 kilometres. In 2010 we were able to add to

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Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

Percentage of prisoners from a given region None Up to 3.5% 3.5–7% 7.5–13% 13.5–18%

L⬘govo VK

Fig. 3.5. Map showing the place of residence or arrest of women in L’govo juvenile colony, 2006.

these findings with a sample of 26 juveniles in the juvenile colony of Novyi Oskol in southern European Russia, whose catchment includes the area extending to the southern border and southern Siberia. Of this sample, 54 per cent were from places more than 1,000 kilometres from the colony, which included six from more than 2,000 kilometres.28 The situation with respect to adult women is better, if only because their colonies are more numerous. Nevertheless, the women respondents to our questionnaire in Mordoviia came from 22 different regions. These were more widely dispersed than those of the girls, reflecting the overcrowding of women’s facilities forcing the colonies to take women from outside of their ‘normal’ catchment. In Mordoviia, there were women from Komi in the north, Chechnia in the south, Novosibirsk and Altai krai in the east, and Briansk in the west. In Mordoviia, the

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Percentage of prisoners from a given region None Up to 1.5% 1.5–9% 9.5–12% 12.5–20%

IK2 and IK14

Fig. 3.6. Map showing the place of former residence of women in correctional colonies (IK2 and IK14) in the Republic of Mordoviia, 2007.

average distance from their former place of residence at 486 kilometres was less for adult women than for juveniles, although one woman had to be brought 2,650 kilometres from Barnaul, in Altai krai. Women’s experience of imprisonment in Russia is, therefore, exceptional and exclusionary compared with the majority of men. Many of the features of prison life are common to both men and women, but a critical difference is in the assignment of the place of imprisonment—where the sentence will actually be served. For all that the latest correction code states that individuals receiving custodial sentences should serve their sentences in their home region, the fact that women are still included in the ‘minority’ groups to which this provision does not apply must put a large question mark over the seriousness with which the Federal Prison Service takes the task of improving the welfare of women prisoners. It is difficult to imag-

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ine that sending women, especially if they are only fourteen or fifteen years old, over such distances is anything but punitive: severing them from their families, subjecting them to long and arduous journeys, and often exposing them to unfamiliar physical environments, adding to the pains of imprisonment in much the same way as for the victims of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transports to the prisons in Port Arthur, Port Blair, or Devil’s Island.

Punitive distance Spatiality and distance have long been a central geographical concern, and these issues have also emerged in sociologists’ theorizations of socio-cultural ‘distance’ and ‘nearness’.29 The keyword in the recent empirical research of human geographers, whether working within a modern or post-modern framework, has been to demonstrate globalization’s annihilation of both place and space by time.30 But this preoccupation has not gone uncontested: the sociologist Stephanie Taylor has argued that place still constitutes an important narrative resource for identity construction, even among the upwardly and geographically hyper-mobile.31 In an exploration of rural development in Canada, Nathan Young builds on earlier ideas of distance as socially constructed by conceptualizing it along three dimensions— its natural or physical attributes, the technological infrastructures that penetrate and/or manipulate spaces, and social relationships among persons in these spaces—which allow us to examine the ways in which the ‘realism’ of distance is articulated in specific and situated ways.32 He also discusses how distance is ‘performed into being’. An ‘actor-centred conceptualization of distance’, he argues, is ‘uniquely capable of capturing and investigating both the physical dimensions of distance, and its relational, power-laden, constructed dimensions and character’.33 This is another way of saying that distance is not just about the number of miles between two places; it is also about the separation between those places as it is experienced and understood by the actors concerned, as indeed was long ago observed by Henri Lefebvre.34 In a later chapter, we discuss how women experience the ‘coercive mobilization’ of the contemporary prison transport in Russia, and how that experience ‘stretches’ the distance separating them from home and family. But the ‘power-laden’ and relational character of the distances over which prisoners are sent is also revealed in tales that relatives tell of the journeys they have to undertake to reach colonies to make prison visits. Here is how the partner of a male prisoner incarcerated in a colony settlement (K-P 27) in Iangary in the north of Arkhangel’sk oblast describes the journey she has to undertake to visit him. She describes the final part of a journey that began in Moscow, 1,000 kilometres to the south: To get there was complicated, actually unrealistic. First, you have to take the train and bus . . . to Sevroonezhsk . . . There you have to find your way to the main administration and get a pass for the ‘train’ to the regime zone . . . [If] you are given a pass you can go to

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the station to await the ‘train’ to the colonies. The station is a small room without glass in the windows, no heating and one bench . . . The train is supposed to set off at 8.40 p.m., but sometimes it doesn’t come until 9.30 or 10 p.m. . . . I’ve put ‘train’ in inverted commas because this isn’t really a train at all: it’s a single wagon . . . of the old prison design, but with the internal cages removed. Moreover, the track isn’t the ordinary sort – it’s narrow gauge, so that you feel like you’re on an American rollercoaster. Sometimes, the train comes off its tracks . . . [and] comes to a stop in the grass . . . Prison guards travel with the driver; they check your passport and ask where you are going and whom you are visiting . . . The journey takes 4–5 hours and sometimes the ‘train’ also pulls wagons with felled timber and provisions . . . with the result that it can sometimes arrive at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. A vehicle waits at the destination . . . it takes you to the visiting room in the colony . . .35

Travellers in penal Russia enter ‘another country’ when they set out to visit prisoners and, like any travellers in a foreign land, they need the correct documentation and abundant physical, financial, and psychological resources to complete the journey successfully.36 Unlike Khordokovsky’s wife, with whom we began this chapter, most prisoners’ relatives belong to the lowest socio-economic groups and inhabit a milieu in which money is in short supply, so that even if they have the strength and inclination to make the journey to visit their ‘loved ones’ incarcerated in the peripheries, they might not be able to afford to do so. Russia’s penal geography puts near insurmountable obstacles in the way of prisoners keeping in face-to-face contact with relatives, with predictable negative impacts for maintaining family ties. The words of advice posted on the Arestant website for people planning to visit prisoners in Russia’s penal colonies convey better than any statistics of ‘average distances’ what we mean when we refer in this book to penal colonies being in remote and difficult-to-access places. Of course, not all colonies are remote in the objective sense: some are located in cities, or not far from them, but even in this case making a visit can be physically and psychologically challenging. Women often comment on the fact that the signifiers of their status as prisoners’ relatives (like the large bags of products they carry) mean that passing cars do not stop to pick them up, or, if they do, they charge inflated prices.37 Thus, notwithstanding the fact that women’s colonies are generally in accessible locations relative to some men’s colonies, they are nonetheless ‘distant’ in the sociological understanding of the word. Here is a description of the final stretch of the trip to the Mordoviia penal zone, the site of women’s colonies in which we conducted our interviews: . . . to get to Leplei is another 25 ‘taiga’ [that is, through the coniferous forest] kilometres . . . There is nothing but colonies. If you are going there for the first time, I advise you to prepare yourself; the place is, of course, creepy. Have a read of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. It’s just the same today – nothing has changed.38

Returning to Young’s threefold conceptualization of distance, it is clear that in the Russian penal context the physical attributes of space take on particular importance. During the height of the Stalinist repression, large numbers of the population of prisoners and exiles were confined to places with extreme

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Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

environments of heat or cold. It is one of the common, although not invariable, consequences of transportation that its victims are relocated to environments that expose them to unfamiliar climates, landscapes, and cultures. Clare Anderson has shown how Indian prisoners expelled to the Andamans by the British experienced fear and confusion at the island’s tropical environment and black tribal peoples.39 The testimonies of gulag victims give harrowing accounts of their experiences of different environments. Evgenia Ginzburg, in her memoir of arrest and transportation to Kolyma in the Far East, describes how women emerging from the holds of prison ships were struck by ‘night blindness’ (apparently the consequence of vitamin deficiency combined with sea air).40 Ginzburg also describes how the physical environment hemmed in the prisoners, the ‘purplish hills’ that surrounded her reminding her of prison walls.41 The way that the physical environment stood in for prison walls is a recurring theme in the testimonies of the gulag’s victims. Whilst northern camps meant that prisoners had to cope with extreme cold in the winter and flying insects during the short Arctic summers, in the deserts of Kazakhstan the environmental challenges were sandstorms and excessive heat.42 Gulag testimonies indicate the complex relationship that prisoners can have with the physical environment. Solzhenitsyn, for example, after a panegyric to its beauty and wealth, bemoans how being forced out to fell timber when the snow was chest-high resulted in convicts coming to hate the forest.43 The frequency with which gulag victims referred to the environment in their testimonies is understandable: cold, heat, dust, insects added to the ‘normal’ pains they experienced as a result of confinement, reducing them to ‘bare life’. Indeed, the environment was one in the repertoire of extra-judicial punishments to which prisoners were subjected in the gulag. Anna Zborovskaia describes how on the Solovki prisoners were punished for violations of the regime by being taken out to a rock by the ocean and stripped to the waist so that they would be tormented by mosquitoes.44 But the environment was used punitively in the gulag on a day-to-day basis in the failure of the authorities to provide appropriate protective clothing, in forcing convicts to work outside in temperatures that were too hot or too cold, in failing to provide heating and ventilation in the domestic barracks, and by restricting diets. The gulag inheritance means that these extremes of temperature and climate, particularly in Russia’s rural hinterland and in the northern and eastern reaches of the country, still pose particular practical problems for prisoners in adapting to new physical conditions, and serve to multiply the ‘reality’ of the distance they feel from home. Tatiana, whom we met above describing the visit to her partner in 2004 in Arkhangel’sk oblast, notes that the convicts in Iangory need: ‘everything: warm clothes (it’s cold even in the summer), blankets, medicines, kettles, utensils and, in the summer, anti-mosquito cream—there are so many flying insects there that it’s impossible to see more than three meters in front of your face. On maps this place is shown as uninhabited.’45

And the following extract from a letter written in 2005 to his mother from a newly arrived prisoner in the north of Perm’ krai indicates that experiencing

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environmental shock can still be a feature of expulsion to the peripheries. The facility described is a colony settlement at Ust’-Tsipel’, far from Perm’ city and at the end of 30 kilometres of dirt road: I have arrived at the edge of the world in a settlement of the type typical of the 1940s . . . A god-forsaken place . . . they get water from a well here, the buildings are falling down through age, the electricity supply breaks down nearly every day because the lines . . . are rotten. We only get electricity three days a week . . . It was minus 5 last night, ice is already on the ponds, and snow fell. There’s nothing strange about that in this region. From here you can see the Urals ridge, and snow permanently lies there. It’s very cold! If it’s already this cold in the autumn, what’s it going to be like in the winter? That’s the Urals for you! . . . Nature is top class here . . . at night you can see the sky, like nowhere else. Even the smallest stars are visible . . . Of course, when I arrived I fell ill. It was because of the change of climate. I’ve also made my acquaintance with bed bugs – they won’t let me sleep – I’m so fed up.’46

The swarms of mosquitoes in the north of Russia that tormented gulag victims did not disappear with the end of the USSR, any more than did prisons located in out-of-the-way places. One of the current authors recalls how in 2006 on a trip to the north Urals she encountered a prisoner sitting on the banks of the Vishera River; his first question to her was whether she had any insect repellent she could give him, because the flying insects drove all the prisoners mad working in the forest. The difficulty we have in determining whether transplanting prisoners into an unfamiliar physical environment is punitive is to disentangle the experience of systematic cruelty common in the gulag from the ‘everyday’ problems that particular environments can cause a captive population; if prisoners are provided with appropriate clothing, rules on work conditions are adhered to, minimum standards pertain in living blocks, and food is sufficient (all quite large asks in respect of some penal systems), does it matter if someone brought up in a temperate climate is transplanted to serve their sentence in the desert or tundra? Our argument is that it does; just as it matters whether the sounds and smells that come over the prison walls or fences are familiar or foreign. Recall the woman we quoted in the previous chapter who commented on the comfort she derived from knowing that she was in her own town, even though she had no way of seeing over the perimeter wall. Her comment echoes the testimony of Irina Tsurkova, arrested as a dissident in 1980, the last Soviet decade, and held for investigation in Leningrad: My first prison spring came. We used the exercise yard with our coats thrown over our shoulders, next to the concrete wall, and slowly, like gourmets, savoured the air. I never thought that air at the beginning of Liteinyi Prospect was so clean and tasty. We inhaled the aroma of melting snow and damp earth; but the strongest was the smell of the Neva. The great river exuded the scent of vast, watery freshness, of watery weeds. For some reason I associated this smell with freedom. We distinctly heard traffic noises from Liteinyi Prospect; we could tell when trolley buses were slowing down to stop not far from the Bolshoi Dom and when they were starting up.47

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A final observation we should like to make about the relationship between prisoners and the geographical placing of prisons is hinted at in Tsurkova’s words: that the physical environment, as well as challenging survival, may also be used subversively. Again we draw on gulag testimonies to make a point that we find is still relevant today. Describing the back-breaking work she was forced to do in a Kolyma stone quarry, Ginzburg recounts: I felt instinctively that even if my legs faltered and my back bent under the load of burning stones, so long as I was capable of being moved by the sea breeze, by the brilliance of the stars and poetry, I should continue to be a living human being. I believed that if one could preserve these things in one’s mind one should be able to withstand the onslaught of this world of horror.’48

De Verteuil and Andrews maintain that landscape even in the most profoundly unhealthy places can act therapeutically, helping people to survive adversity.49 The poet Andrei Siniavskii, who in the 1960s was incarcerated in Mordoviia, commented on the calming effect of snow falling: ‘Mercifully the snow distracts one a little—somehow it makes you calmer to see it going on in spite of everything. What would it care? It just gets on with its job in volumes like manna from heaven.’50 Few of our interview participants had the literary skills of the gulag memoirists, but they did comment on the pleasure they derived from seeing the stands of pine trees (these were visible on the hill above IK2 in Mordoviia) and experiencing the purity of the air.

Conclusion The prospects for change in Russia’s geography of penality are not, in the short term, encouraging. Although there are humanitarian and economic reasons for Russia to achieve a more proportional spread of prisoners, there are strong interests working in a contrary direction. Among these interests are those of the ‘penal practitioners’—people working in the penal service—whose stored experience will continue to influence the practical choices Russia makes about its system of punishment. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the majority of prison officers in Russia are used to working beyond the public gaze and they have been socialized into a system whose traditional emphasis is on exclusion and separation, rather than on rehabilitation and (re)integration. Furthermore, were penal colonies to be relocated to metropolitan centres, it is not obvious that the rank-and-file employees in the peripheries would find alternative employment. So the people inhabiting Russia’s penal regions have a strong interest in maintaining the present geography of colonies; but so too do the inhabitants of the ‘donor’ regions who are able to displace deviancy to the peripheries. Valery Abramkin, whose work for a Moscowbased prison reform NGO we quoted above, has drawn attention to the negative consequences of this for crime reduction in the metropolis. Rather than take responsibility for someone who has completed his sentence, he suggests, city

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governments like that in Moscow find it easier ‘to provoke him, arrest him, and send him back’ to the peripheries.51 We have tried to show in this chapter how Russia’s geography is such that inevitably it is experienced punitively; it cuts off prisoners from their relatives, but also subjects them to unfamiliar and often harsh environments that leave them feeling ‘out of place’ and ‘far away’. These pains were most extreme during the gulag period. The paradox today is that as the conditions of confinement have improved in Russia and the most serious excesses of the Soviet camp are eliminated or moderated, the geographic factors have moved to the foreground. Principal among these is the practice of sending women prisoners and juveniles long distances to serve their sentences; and this is now the subject of discussion and criticism by penal reformers both inside and outside the penal service. Much of Part II of this book discusses the evidence for how distance is experienced by women prisoners today. But first we move down the spatial scale to discuss transportation and exile’s other modality: how Russia’s prisoner population is regulated in the places of confinement in which they find themselves in the peripheries.

Notes 1. Khordokovsky is the former owner of the oil company Yukos, who was arrested in 2003 for fraud, found guilty in what many have said was a show trial, and given an 8-year sentence. He was sent to IK10 in Krasnokamensk in Chita oblast in the Far East. In 2010 after a further trial he was given a 14-year sentence and moved to a colony in Arkhangel’sk oblast. 2. Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), p. 44; Mikhlin, A. S., Kharakteristika osuzhdennykh k lisheniiu svobody. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi, 2001, vol. 2 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), p. 56. 3. Vzgliad. Delovaia gazeta 12/10/2010: http://www.vz.ru/news/2010/12/10/453856.html [accessed May 2012]. 4. Bauman, S., ‘Social issues of law and order’, British Journal of Criminology, 40 (2000), pp. 205–21; Foucault, M., Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1976 (Verso: London, 2003); Garland, D., Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social History (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1990); Kedar, B. Z., ‘Expulsion as an issue of world history’, Journal of World History, 7/2 (1996), pp. 65–80; Herbert, S., Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997); Herbert, S. and Brown, E., ‘Conceptions of space and crime in the punitive neoliberal city’, Antipode, 38 (2006), pp. 755–77. 5. There is an enormous literature on the use of exile by European powers. Explanations include the use of exile to settle overseas, like the Portuguese use of the degredos to populate Goa and West Africa, the need for forced or slave labour in the New World colonies, and to relieve prison overcrowding. See Anderson, C., ‘Unfree labour and its discontents: transportation from Mauritius to Australia, 1825–1845, Australian Studies, 13/ 1 (1998), pp. 116–33; Anderson, C., Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53 (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2000); Coates, T. J., Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 2001); Morgan, G. and Rushton, P., Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (PalgraveMacmillan: Basingstoke, 2004).

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6. Gentes, A., Exile to Siberia 1590–1822 (Palgrave-Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2008), p.167 passim. 7. Dallin, D. J. and Nicolaevsky, B. I., Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (Hollis and Carter: New York, 1947); Harris, J. R., ‘The growth of the gulag: forced labor in the Urals region, 1929–31’, Russian Review, 56/2 (1997), pp. 265–80; Nordlander, D., ‘Magadan and the economic history of Dalstroi in the 1930s’, in P. R. Gregory and V. Lazerev (eds), The Economics of Forced Labour. The Soviet Gulag (Hoover Institution Press: California, 2003), pp. 105–26. 8. Willis, J. J., ‘Punishment and cultural limits to state power in late 18th-century Britain’, Punishment & Society, 10 (2008), p. 402. 9. Beckett, K. and Herbert, S., ‘Penal boundaries: Banishment and the expansion of punishment’, Law and Social Enquiry, 35/1 (2010), pp. 1–38. 10. For exile and expulsion up to the twentieth century see Gentes, op. cit., Kennan, G., Siberia and the Exile System, vols. I and II (University Press of the Pacific: Honolulu, 2002); Lincoln, W. B., The Conquest of a Continent. Siberia and the Russians (Random House: New York, 1994); Wood, A., ‘Siberian exiles in the 18th century’, Sibirica, 1/1 (1990), pp. 38–63. 11. For the Soviet exile system, see Polian, P. M., Ne po Svoei Vole. Istoriia i Geografiia Prinuditel’nykh Migratsii v SSSR (Memorial: Moscow, 2001); Fitzpatrick, S. (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (Routledge: London, 2000); Shearer, D., ‘Crime and social disorder in Stalin’s Russia—a reassessment of the Great Retreat and the origin of mass repression’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 39/1–2 (1998), pp. 119–48. 12. Loss, M., ‘The technologies of total domination’, Surveillance and Society, 2/1 (2004), p. 31. Loss, in her exegesis on the technologies of total domination in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, notes the striking resemblance between the Soviet comprehensive regulation of population and Foucault’s description of plague control at the end of the seventeenth century. 13. Getty, J. Arch, ‘“Excesses are not permitted”: Mass terror and Stalinist governance in the late 1930s’, Russian Review, 61 (2002), pp. 113–38; Hagenloh, P. M., Stalin’s Police. Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR 1929–1941, (John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2009); Hagenloh, P., ‘“Socially harmful elements” and the Great Terror’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (Routledge: London, 2000), pp. 286–305. 14. Jakobson, M., Origins of the Gulag. The Soviet Prison Camp System 1917–1934 (University of Kentucky Press: Kentucky, 1993), p. 88. 15. Pallot J., ‘Forced labour for forestry: the twentieth-century history of colonization and settlement in the north of Perm’ oblast, Europe-Asia Studies, 54/7 (2002), pp.1055–83; Viola, L., The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford University Press: New York, 2007). 16. Pallot, 2002, op cit., p. 1070; Pallot, J., ‘Russia’s penal peripheries: space, place and penalty in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30 (2005), pp. 104–8. 17. The maps we include in this chapter are taken from a map series of camps and distribution of prisoners we produced at two-year intervals between 1923 and 1960, accessible at http://www.gulagmaps. org. This website displays five map series plotting different aspects of the labour camp system in Russia from 1930 to the present day (but with a gap from 1960–90 when there are no systematic data available). For the Stalin and immediate post-Stalin period we have used Smirnov, M. B., Spravochnik sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR (Memorial: Moscow, 1998). 18. There is no complete record of prisoner numbers, so in order to produce the map for Figure 3.1 we summed the data on the number of prisoners for each camp in an oblast for the five-year period 1949–53 and divided by the number of years for which there are data. 19. Pallot, 2002, op. cit.; Pallot, J., Piacentini, L., and Moran, D., ‘Patriotic discourses in Russia’s penal peripheries: remembering the Mordovan gulag’, Europe-Asia Studies, 62/1 (2010), pp. 1–33. 20. www.zakonia.ru/news/72/60468 [accessed May 2012]. 21. Smith, P., Punishment and Culture (Chicago University Press: Chicago, 2008). 22. Walmsley, R., World Prison Population List (9th edn) at http://www.idcr.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2010/09/WPPL-9-22.pdf [accessed 13 March 2012].

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23. The Moscow Centre for Prison Reform (MCPR) English-language website is at www.prison.org/ english/mcpr.htm; the table of the rate of imprisonment by region was accessed 24 March 2003, but has not been available since. It is discussed in Pallot, 2005, op. cit., pp. 98–112. 24. Moran, D., Pallot, J., and Piacentini, L., ‘The geography of crime and punishment in the Russian Federation’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 52/1 (2011), pp. 79–104. 25. The oblast isn’t much better provided. As of summer 2011 it had one colony for women, one juvenile colony, two colony settlements, and one correctional colony for men. 26. Oxley, D., Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Studies in Australian History, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1996). 27. Discussions of women are sometimes dealt with in a single separate chapter together with children. See, for example, Applebaum, A., Gulag. A History of the Soviet Camps (Allen Lane, Penguin: London, 2003), ch.15; Buca, E., Vorkuta (Constable: London, 1967), ch. 10; Mochulsky, F. V., Gulag Boss. A Soviet Memoir (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011), ch. 24; Shalamov, V., Kolyma Tales (Penguin: London, 1994), pp. 415–33; Solzhenitsyn, A., The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2 (Collins/Fontana: Glasgow, 1975), ch 8. 28. One of the furthest was ‘Lidiia’, who whilst still 15 was brought to Novyi Oskol, a journey of 2,093 km from home. She was one year into a 2 years 9 months sentence for theft at the time of the survey. Whilst Lidiia said her parents intended to visit her, they hadn’t at the time of the survey. 29. For example, Davis, D., ‘The power of distance: re-theorizing social movements in Latin America’, Theory and Society, 28 (1999), pp. 585–638. 30. Cairncross, F., The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution will Change our Lives (Harvard Business School Press: Boston, 1997); Castells, M., The Rise of the Network Society (Blackwell: Cambridge, MA, 1996); Giddens, A., The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 1990); Harvey, D., The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell: Cambridge, MA, 1989). 31. Taylor, S., Narratives of Identity and Place (Routledge: London, 2010). 32. Young, N., ‘Distance as a hybrid actor in rural economies’, Journal of Rural Studies, 22 (2006), p. 254. 33. Ibid., pp. 263–4. 34. Lefebvre theorized space along three axes in his spatial trilectic; see Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space (Blackwell: Oxford, 1991). 35. This quotation from a woman whose partner is imprisoned in Arkhangel’sk (K-P 27) is extracted from the Arestant website, now more or less defunct, that operated in the 1990s to give advice to prisoners and their relatives. It can still sometimes be accessed at http://www.arestant.msk.rukoorcenter1.shtml. See Pallot, J., ‘“Gde muzh, tam zhena” (Where the husband is, so is the wife): space and gender in post-Soviet patterns of penality’, Environment and Planning, A 39 (2007), pp. 570–89; and Pallot, J., ‘Continuities in penal Russia: space and gender in post-Soviet geography of punishment’, in T. Luhausen and P. Solomon (eds), What is Soviet Now? Identities, Legacies, Memories (LIT Verlag: Berlin, 2008), pp. 234–56. 36. Pallot, 2007, op. cit. 37. Ibid. 38. Arestant, op. cit.: Mordoviia, IK5, Lena, 26 May 2004. 39. Anderson, 2000, op. cit.; Anderson, C., The Indian Uprising of 1857 (Anthem: London, 2007), ch. 5: The Andamans. See also Bullard, A., Exile to Paradise. Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South Pacific (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 2000) which discusses the communard exiles’ encounter with wilderness in New Caledonia. 40. Ginzburg, E., Into the Whirlwind (Harvill Collins: London, 1967), p. 250. 41. Ibid., pp. 272–3. 42. According to an anonymous testimony under the heading of ‘Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist’, written around 1949–53. It is found in Saunders, G. (ed.), Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (Monard Press: New York, 1974). 43. Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 185–6.

72 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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Shapovalov, op. cit., p. 288. Arestant, op. cit.: Archangel, K-P27, Tatiana, 4 November 2004. Arestant, op. cit.: Perm’, K-P8, Maria R, 5 October 2005. Shapovalov, op. cit., p. 191. Ginszburg, op. cit., p. 260. Verteuil, G. de and Andrews, G., ‘Surviving profoundly unhealthy places: the ambivalent, fragile and absent therapeutic landscapes of the Soviet gulag’, in A. Williams (ed.), Therapeutic Landscapes: Advances and Applications (Ashgate: Farnham, 2007), pp. 273–87. 50. Siniavskii, A., A Voice from the Chorus (Fontana/Collins: Glasgow, 1973), p. 44. 51. Abramkin, V., Chelovek i Tiur’ma, 1998, http://www.prison.org/facts/human_3htm [accessed 2 August 2001] quoted also in Pallot, 2005, op. cit., p. 102.

4 Correctional Colonies in their Local Setting On 26 May 2006 the inhabitants of ten villages located along a single-track railway line running north from Pot’ma mainline station in the south-west corner of the Republic of Mordoviia gathered in a stadium to watch a parade.1 After singing the Russian national anthem, the assembled company listened to the welcoming speech of Major-General V.A. Mal’kov, the head of Ufsin-Mordoviia, the regional penal authority of the republic, who was joined on the podium by the deputy director of the Federal Penal Service from Moscow, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Mordoviia, and various other penal service and local officials. The parade took the form of a military march-past headed by the special operations forces, or spetsnaz. Representatives of all the regional service’s constituent departments followed in military formation behind. A medal ceremony, at which Mal’kov was presented with a medal sponsored by the Russia Orthodox Church ‘for universal repentance’, was concluded with the singing of a newly-composed anthem honouring the Mordoviian penal service. Spectators and participants were then treated to displays of dog-handling, and of the spetsnaz’s physical prowess and operational readiness in a demonstration of hand-to-hand combat, the splitting of piles of bricks with a single blow of a hammer, and a mock-up of an operation to recapture a bus seized by armed terrorists. The celebrations were rounded off in the evening with a dance in the club in Yavas, the ‘capital’ of the Mordoviian penal sub-region. Thus it was that the 75th anniversary of the creation of one of the islands of Stalin’s carceral archipelago was celebrated by the current and former employees of Russia’s penal service. The Mordoviian ‘island’ has been known by different names since the first contingent of prisoners was brought to drain the swamps and fell the forests in this part of the Russian taiga. In the dissident literature of the 1960s and 70s it is generally referred to as the ‘Pot’ma camp’ rather than ‘institution ZhKh-385’, its official title until 2005. Among officers and guards working in the seventeen colonies of the sub-region today it is generally referred to by its 1940s name of Dubravlag, a shortened version of Dubravnyi lager’ or ‘Oak Grove Camp’ as it became in 1948 (from the original Temnikovskii lager’), at a time when many large camp complexes were re-named after natural features. The day’s proceedings were reported in the local newspaper of the administrative district

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(raion) in which the majority of colonies are situated. Having registered that readers might be surprised to learn of the celebrations, the reporter noted that many warm words were spoken during the day directed at ‘all those who day and night toil in this difficult service’ and who have given their ‘time, health, and energy’ to ensure the continued existence of Dubravlag.2 Ufsin-Mordoviia’s internal newspaper, a monthly publication targeted at a readership of local inhabitants, many present and retired serving officers and guards, and the 14–15,000 penal colony inmates, was more triumphal in its tone as it looked to a future of expanded activity: It is 75 years since that memorable day on 25 May 1931 when, by order of the OGPU, Temnikovskii camp was founded. The Collective of Ufsin-Mordoviia greets this glorious jubilee with confidence in a future that will be marked by the further development of correctional colonies and remand prisons in the region and of all our dependent settlements.3

It is redundant to observe that the tens of thousands of people who since 1931 have passed through Mordoviia’s penal facilities might have chosen a different way of marking this anniversary, but their views were not canvassed. Like so much that has taken place in this part of rural Russia, the celebrations were concealed from the gaze of a wider public. The parade, moreover, was but one of a variety of celebratory acts marking the 75th anniversary. These included the refurbishment of a museum devoted to the history of the penal service in Mordoviia, a series of articles in the institutional newspapers about the settlements and colonies in the penal zone and the ‘dynastic families’ that have given decades of continuous service to penal operations in the region, the publication of commemorative poems and reminiscences penned by personnel, and a competition to compose a new anthem dedicated to 75 years of the Mordoviian penal service. The form and content of these various commemorative acts present an image of the service that emphasizes its military character and patriotism. Tradition and continuity of service, marked by respect for discipline, hierarchy, and physical strength underpin this message, the purpose of which is to inculcate in the people living in settlements that have traditionally serviced the correctional institutions loyalty to the ‘Little Motherland’ (Malaia Rodina). Such patriotic and loyal ‘little motherlands’ are to be found scattered through the penal heartland that we described in Chapter 3. They mark the places that long ago were selected to receive people expelled from the centre. They constitute the second spatial rung in Russia’s system of social control through expulsion and confinement. A consequence of the reproduction of such places of penal colonization and isolation in the peripheries has been the creation of discrete territories enclosing the institutions in which prisoners are incarcerated and the settlements serving them. Solzhenitsyn’s archipelago referred both to camps in which prisoners were incarcerated and the complex of civilian and military institutions needed to support them, and also to the ‘ships’ and ‘ports’ that kept one part of the structure connected with others. The gulag’s ‘islands’ contained very distinctive societies, structurally different from those that surrounded them, and they have been

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reproducing themselves ever since. Apart from the prisoners, these are populated by penal personnel, conscripts—who until recently made up the prison guard (okhrana)—former prisoners who have stayed on, and the descendants and relatives of all these previous categories. These ‘island societies’ have at times been magnets for indigenous local populations in search of employment and higher living standards, but the majority originate from other parts of Russia. This ‘society of captors’ has traditionally been inward looking, with limited contacts with communities lying beyond. Outwardly, there might be some resemblance to places like the ‘iron triangle’ in Stark, Florida; but in Russia the isolation and separation is so much greater and the society much ‘stranger’. We argue that the ‘strangeness’ of Russia’s penal places is not simply an interesting curio but that the isolation, in-breeding and self-consciously promoted difference of such places matters for the people incarcerated in facilities located in them. Retributive and rehabilitative systems of punishment are differentially served by prison-siting practices. The location of penal institutions in the Russian Federation is inherited from a time when retribution was the order of the day and people were sent to prison to provide slave labour for resource mobilization. But the sites chosen are ill-suited to the current rehabilitative aims of the penal service; it goes without saying that exiling prisoners to extra-urban locations in the rural peripheries undermines the goal of supporting prisoners’ family relationships and makes the coordination between prisons and welfare agencies in the places into which prisoners will be released well-nigh impossible. On top of this, the isolation of facilities coupled with the weak development of civil society in Russia means that involvement in the monitoring and promotion of legal standards and rights-based interventions in prisons, which have been shown to make a difference to prisoners’ well-being and human rights in other jurisdictions, is largely absent in Russia.4 Any meaningful prison reform would bring Russia’s penal institutions into the metropolitan centres and regions of the country where most crime is committed, but economic costs make such a restructuring of the penal estate extremely unlikely in the near future. If, as seems more likely, prison reform will take place within the existing spatial framework of facilities, the issue of the relationship between prisons, the enclosed communities that have grown up around them, and the broader society beyond will become increasingly important.

Less-than-total, total institutions The south-west corner of Mordoviia where the 75th anniversary celebrations took place was one of the smaller islands of the gulag, modest compared with places like Magadan where a whole oblast was under the control of the NKVD. Nevertheless, the territory it occupied was substantial. Figure 4.1 shows its territorial extent in the mid-1930s when its prisoner population was around 30,000.5 The camp’s felling operations took place in the forest sections shown in Roman numerals on the map, with the result that the territory directly controlled

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Mordovia Gulag camps:

I

II

Station

Ten’gushevskii R. D.

Camp administration

IV

Camp sub-division (lag otdelenie)

III

Barashevo

Subsidiary sub-division (lag punkt)

V VIII

I - XIV

Forestry subdivision in which camp operated

VII Temnikovskii R. D.

XIII VI R.

R . Va d

XIV

Zavodskaia

Ya v a s

Atiur’evskii R. D.

IX X

Zubovo-Polianskii R. D.

Leplei

XII ar R. P

tsa

XI

Legend Gorbeevskii R. D.

Oblast boundary District boundary Mainline railway

To Moscow

Single gauge railway

Pot’ma II

River Forest

0

Zubova Polyana

Zubova Zubovo Poliana

To Saransk

8 km

Fig. 4.1. Temlag, Mordovia, in the 1930s showing the forest sections worked by forced labour.

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by the NKVD overlapped into five civilian authorities. The first contingent of prisoners who were brought to the region lived in earthen dug-outs, but, in time, these were replaced by wooden barracks enclosed by wooden fences. Liudmila Granovskaia describes arriving at the Mordoviian colonies in 1937 after a long trek through the forest: she saw thick wooden fences ‘the height of three men’ and a large gate opened by a winch that ‘swallowed up the mass of human beings’.6 Other gulag testimonies tell similar stories of long overland treks through deserts, the tundra, forests, and steppe to places of confinement. The ‘gulag boss’ Mochulsky, sent to the north, tells of how, even as an NKVD officer, he faced a five-day trek on horseback from his disembarkation point on the White Sea coast to his destination in Pechorlag (the prisoners went by foot).7 It was small wonder that in the most remote places fence enclosures could sometimes be dispensed with and camp bosses were prepared to give prisoners furloughs because they knew there was no realistic chance of successful escape; geography substituted for the prison fence. Whether camps were deep in the forest or in a city, one of the features of the gulag that is only now attracting the attention of historians was the relative porosity of its boundaries that allowed some prisoners to interact with people and communities outside the camps.8 Time spent in the barracks was limited, prisoners normally being taken under convoy off-site to work in forests, mines, the latest construction project, or in a factory. In any of these places, they might work alongside or be supervised by non-convict labour consisting of exiles or ‘free workers’. Research in archives opened since 1991 has shown that, in addition to such labour brigades, there were also large numbers of non- or de-convoyed (raskonvoirovannye) prisoners in the gulag; that is, prisoners who were allowed to go unescorted to their assigned place of work. These prisoners were supposed to stick to defined routes, but there is evidence that they found ways of using their privileged position to engage in illicit activities, including trade with local populations, and, for those in urban settings, to visit the cinema or stores. There were also prisoners who were allowed to live outside the compound. It is true that interactions with the outside world normally took place within a territory controlled by the prison authorities and in settlements populated by personnel and the camp hangers-on that Solzhenitsyn so derided in The Gulag Archipelago, but it was a freedom of sorts.9 Historians have calculated that, at a conservative estimate, non-convoy prisoners constituted 10 per cent of the total gulag population in the post-war years.10 The gulag’s closed universe thus extended beyond the gates of the prison and was not confined within it. The initial settlements that grew up to service the labour colonies were modest structures, consisting of earth dug-outs and barracks similar to those for the prisoners but more comfortable within. They grew and matured in the decades that followed. In Mordoviia, for example, Yavas, the current ‘capital’ of the penal zone and a sizable well-appointed settlement, started life as a cluster of barracks around the sawmill built to process the timber harvested in the forest. The progression from temporary encampment to more permanent settlement was

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repeated throughout the penal heartland in the places that were selected to retain their penal function after Stalin’s death. Where colonies were located in larger towns and cities, personnel could draw on the services provided by the metropolitan authority. In extra-urban locations and virgin territories it fell to the penal authorities to develop the services and infrastructure themselves. In the postStalin rationalization of camps, prisoners were deployed in large numbers to improve living conditions for their captors, building schools, clubs, and hospitals.11 Many of the resulting settlements were hidden from view and accessible only with an appropriate pass. They belonged to the category of Soviet settlements that were called ‘postbox towns’, identified only by their postcode, invisible on any published map of the country and subject to controlled access.12 Wherever there were multiple colonies and other penal institutions covering a wide territory, they would coalesce into a discrete ‘penal zone’. To those living outside, these zones were ‘black holes’ on the map of Russia—‘no-go’ territories that had no formal administrative status and whose existence, whilst known about, was never openly acknowledged. Nevertheless, to continue with Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor, it was obvious that some bridges connected the islands of the archipelago to the world beyond. Certain civil functions, such as the registration of births, marriages, and deaths had to be recorded in the nearest district centre; local people would be drawn to the possibilities of trade with the penal colonies or by the prospect of well-paid work (compared with the collective farms) and to non-military jobs in colonies’ production units. And local communities could become the destination of released prisoners denied the right to return to their former place of residence. But whatever the interactions between penal zones and the wider community, power and advantage always lay squarely with the former. Labour camps, work settlements, and transit prisons of the gulag had been inserted into the landscape with no regard to the preferences and needs of weakly-developed regional and local governments, and horizontal links between the penal bureaucracy and lower level civilian authorities were always limited. Penal administrations remained under no obligation to consider the impact of their activities on the rural localities, towns, or metropolitan districts in which they were situated. And thus it more or less remained until the present time.

The ‘frontiers and boundaries’ of Russia’s penal zones13 The gulag, thus, created a complicated spatial geography of matrioshka-style nested territories: at the highest spatial scale was the USSR, within which there were discrete penal zones—the fiefdoms of the NKVD and its successors—and within these, clusters of various types of penal facilities that might extend over a wide area. But we have also seen that none of these territories or zones was a closed universe; rather, their boundaries were to some degree porous. These

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boundaries have always been policed by the Russian prison service, however, with the result that the space within has become the site of a cultural and social community and ‘world of meaning’ that has marked it out from what lies beyond. In Figure 4.2 we represent diagrammatically such bounded spaces in a hypothetical ‘penal zone’ as it might be today. At the centre are a number of penal facilities ‘A’ attached to settlements. Colony perimeters are substantial structures consisting of double wooden fences or concrete walls, barbed wire, watchtowers, and a single point of entry. Immediately beyond the perimeter is a 10–15 metre security strip, ‘B’, on which ‘regime rules’ apply; this means, among other things, that it cannot be entered without the permission of the penal authorities (the rules specifically forbid the grazing of villagers’ animals, for example). In rural regions, these spaces are also surrounded by another zone enclosed within a physically less tangible boundary, ‘C’, that defines the outer limit of the territory patrolled by the penal authority. In forested regions, for example, this would correspond to the forest sections in which prisoners are deployed to fell timber, or it might correspond to the arable land and pastures belonging to prisons’ subsidiary enterprises. Beyond lies the territory under the purview of local authorities. The marker of the outer boundary of the zone can take the form of a barrier on exit and entrance roads (with a passport control point) or be defined by roving patrols. Here is how one pensioner interviewed in Mordoviia described his discovery of the location of the boundary enclosing ‘C’ in the 1980s: I’m not sure about telling you . . . but perhaps all of this is common knowledge now. Well, once we went on a field trip . . . we had to cross the Moksha River to get to the ancient town of Kadym. We left the main road and were walking down a forest path when a forest warden came out and asked where we were going . . . and he warned us, ‘Turn around immediately and leave this road, otherwise they will arrest you. They won’t let you go there.’ I realized that we’d nearly entered the closed zone.14

The ‘penal zones’, like the one our respondent was prevented from entering, never had any formal administrative status, and might, as shown in the diagram, overlap several local authorities. In the rest of this chapter we continue with the example of the south-west of the Republic of Mordoviia to examine how the permeability of the boundaries of the carceral space enclosing penal facilities has changed since 1990. The boundary between C and D in Figure 4.2 has begun to erode, allowing greater interaction between the penal zone and communities beyond as indicated by the headed arrow. Penal institutions now hold open days, invite officials from local social services to give lectures to prisoners, and allow local newspapers to report on life in the zone. However, in one of those peculiarly Russian paradoxes, greater transparency has also resulted in prisoners who in the past might have spent periods of the day outside their colony being ‘gathered back’ behind the colony fences.

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Settlement

Boundary of penal sub-region Raion (local authority) centre

D

Civilian settlement Regime zone

‘The Zone’

Penal colony

C B

A

Raion (local authority) boundary

Fig. 4.2. Schematic representation of the boundaries enclosing penal facilities in a hypothetical rural region.

The zone in its local context Figure 4.3 is a map of the Mordoviian penal zone as it is today. The ‘zone’ lies between the two passport control points at Pot’ma and Barashevo as it did in the 1930s, but it has contracted laterally as a result of a decline in timber harvesting operations. Forestry has been replaced by other penal industries—metallurgy, clothes making, and wood processing—which take place within the precincts of the correctional facilities. The zone, though, still constitutes a coherent geographical entity, isolated from the surrounding areas by the limited connectivity of its network of minor roads. Its focus is Yavas, now a small town with a population of 7,800 and the location of the headquarters of republic penal authority. In addition to overseeing the seventeen colonies in the zone, Ufsin-Mordoviia is also responsible for three remand prisons elsewhere in the republic and the penal inspectorate that implements non-custodial sentences. With a population of 4,300, Pot’ma is the other sizable settlement in the zone. The mainline railway station in Pot’ma, where prisoners from all over Russia are disgorged, is a major alternative source of civilian employment in the settlement that, otherwise, specializes in ‘residential institutions’; it has one penal colony, the transit prison, a home for elderly and infirm ex-prisoners, and a residential home for 250 disabled children. In many respects Pot’ma and Yavas, with their mixture of five-storey apartment blocks, allotments on the outskirts, squares with monuments to war heroes and revolutionary leaders, shops, cafes and clubs resemble other equivalent-sized settlements

Correctional Colonies in their Local Setting

81 Legend Oblast boundary

Ten’gushevskii R. D.

District boundary Road Internal passport control (KPP)

Barashevo

Mainline railway Single gauge railway River

Shveinaia II

Forest

Lesnoi

Temnikovskii R. D.

Shaly

Ozernii

Zubova Poliana

= Administrative Centre of Rural District

Yavas

R . Va d

R.

8 km

0

Ya va s

Partsa Udarnyi

Atiur’evskii R. D.

Leplei

Zubovo-Polianskii R. D.

Pionerskii

Sosnovka

ar R. P tsa

Molochnitsa

Gorbeevskii R. D. Valkorka

To Moscow

Pot’ma Tsentral’nii

Zubova Poliana To Saransk

Fig. 4.3. The penal zone in Zubovo-Polianskii raion in the Federal Republic of Mordoviia.

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in the more remote peripheries of rural Russia. But there are tell-tale signs that these are no ‘ordinary’ places. In Yavas there is a higher-than-average density of administrative buildings and smaller-than-average vegetable plots (that elsewhere in rural Russia would be essential for survival for such an out-of-the-way place).15 There is also a large state-of-the art hospital, an estate of substantial detached houses, and a range of good quality products on sale in the shops, which indicate that there is something special about this place—not to mention the fences, barbed wire, and watchtowers, and the fact that every other pedestrian is in uniform. One local government official explained: ‘[Yavas] has no other enterprises—only penitentiaries. There are schools, a forest authority, kindergartens . . . but otherwise, just penitentiaries.’16 The names Yavas, Pot’ma, Leplei, Barashevo, Sosnovka, Udarnyi, and Lesnoi stalk the pages of memoirs of the literary, religious, and political oppositionists who were incarcerated here in the 1960s and 70s.17 Today, anyone can visit these settlements, but this is a place into which few people voluntarily venture without good purpose. The majority of settlements and correctional colonies making up the Mordoviian zone today are located in Zubovo-Polianskii raion (rural district or county), occupying the northern one-third of its territory. Prisons aside, Zubovo-Polianskii in the Soviet period was a typical agro-industrial county in the rural hinterland of European Russia. Its principal economic activity was timber harvesting and processing, and the majority of the population were members of one of the collective farms established in the 1930s. The district benefited from centralized resource allocation to support public services and infrastructure, but the low population density and relative remoteness, combined with the fact that it lay astride the mainline railway east, meant that it was just the sort of place for the location of activities the USSR government preferred to keep away from prying eyes. In addition to prisons and a transistor factory that served the military-industrial complex, nearby was one of the ‘polygons’ of the Soviet nuclear defence arsenal, and the district was also the site for the dumping of nuclear contaminants from the Chernobyl accident. The raion administration, still less the population, had no say in the decisions about these developments. In the crisis that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ZubovoPolianskii district’s economy suffered immediate decline: the transistor factory shut, a fall-off in demand for timber products undermined forestry, and agriculture collapsed. To survive, the population turned to their small plots and forests. Under the stewardship of a politically ambitious head, a slow recovery began to be made after 1998: the transistor plant re-opened manufacturing civilian radios, timber harvesting resumed (albeit on a small scale), and merged and pared-down farms began producing surpluses of meat and milk products. The two largest settlements lying outside the zone, Zubova Poliana, the capital with a population of 10,400, and Umet with 2,900, were both showing signs of economic growth prior to the current financial crisis.18 Nevertheless, with its weakened agriculture sector, few industries, and net population decline, Zubovo-Polianskii district continues to manifest the characteristics of a

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depressed rural periphery and its prospects have not been improved by the 2008 financial and subsequent crisis.19 Were this California, the existence of a cluster of penal institutions in a depressed rural region would be a source of some local celebration, because they would be thought to guarantee employment and boost demand for goods and services.20 But Zubovo-Polianskii district is in Russia where the benefits to the local community of the location in its midst of a cluster of correctional facilities plus the regional penal authority’s headquarters has, historically, been limited. The hermeticallysealed gulag economy meant that all the production that went on in the labour camps had little impact on the local economy; and the same was true where jobs were concerned, as army conscripts were used for guard duties and officers were ‘helicoptered’ in from outside. Furthermore, since the penal authority had its own farms and light industries, ran its own electricity station, and built its own infrastructure, the needs of the settlements and colonies were satisfied from within the zone. The deputy curator of the prison museum, interviewed in Yavas in 2008, explained it thus: ‘WE belonged to the district but we were not of it . . . we were just a postal address . . . Everything in the settlement belonged to us—schools, hospitals, registry office.’21 For Zubovo-Polianskii administration, these were opportunities lost but the compensation was that the zone made few calls on its budget. The post-Soviet period has been one of momentous change in Zubovo-Polianskii district. The combination of the ‘market transition’, administrative reform, and changes in the penal service have made the territorial division of the district into two parts increasingly untenable. The current order of the day is integration between the penal authorities and two levels of local government—within the zone with the lowest rung of civilian government (the township and village governments) and on the next rung up with the Zubovo-Polianksii district government. The political rebalancing that this involves is taking place against a backdrop of a rapidly changing way of life for a majority of the inhabitants of the district, but, more especially, for those living inside the zone.

Retrenchment in the zone The economic shocks of the 1990s that led to the closure of farms and factories in the civilian sector of Zubovo-Polianskii county were mirrored in the ‘zone’ and heralded what prison personnel refer to today as the ‘difficult times’. With prison budgets severely cut, the loss of orders undermining the penal economy, and rising numbers of prisoners, Ufsin-Mordoviia was forced to retrench. Among the areas hit were expenditures on capital projects and repair and maintenance in the settlements serving the correctional colonies. Public utilities, which the penal authority had developed and run, were sold off to private companies. Inhabitants of the zone have found it hard to adjust to lower living standards and are nostalgic for a past when they benefited from a privileged lifestyle when the penal authority’s patronage brought material benefits to the zone’s inhabitants: the clubs, means of communication, bathhouses, food and consumer goods produced in the colony

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bakeries, farms and factories, and the services of mechanics, builders, and plumbers were available to everyone regardless of whether they were current prison personnel, pensioners, workers in the service sector, or employed by the mainline railway. The privileges that former and existing prison personnel enjoyed— enhanced pensions, higher than average pay, extended holidays, housing, and early retirement—contributed to what all our respondents agreed was a comfortable life by the standards of the day. In the 1990s this lifestyle was disrupted, although the impact of retrenchment was experienced differentially. Smaller villages, like Sosonovka, Leplei, and Molotchnitsa, suffered more than Yavas, whose status was boosted when it became the headquarters of the whole Mordoviian penal service. In our 2008 questionnaire, 40 per cent of respondents claimed their village was ‘dying’, and 32.2 per cent as a consequence said they wanted to leave. They claimed the penal authorities were responsible for failing to protect them from the worst effects of the collapse of Communism and for giving in to outside pressure to change practices that had become an integral part of their daily life. In the Soviet period there was a flourishing shadow economy in the products of penal labour that benefited local people. One of our respondents, a pensioner and former prisoner in one of the women’s colonies, described how she was part of a collective of ‘particularly talented’ seamstresses who made clothes to order for the families of prison personnel, whilst other civilian respondents explained how they used to buy furniture and toys produced in the colonies at discounted prices that could be sold on outside the zone or to passengers on trains that stopped at Pot’ma mainline station. Particularly irksome for many inhabitants of the zone is the ban that has been imposed on colonies hiring out prisoners to do jobs around the settlements, which ranged from domestic repairs to house building, as this exchange from a conversation between two pensioners shows: P ENSIONER 1: Before they were correctional [her emphasis] labour colonies . . . They, you see, used work as a means of rehabilitation. And they [the prisoners] worked without guards. Men and women, they all worked in the settlement . . . and, of course, that was useful. P ENSIONER 2: And you didn’t have to pay them. P ENSIONER 1: It was free labour. P ENSIONER 2: Yes, but how free really? . . . you had to pay for the work from your own purse. Of course, it was good for the settlement. Now such non-convoy prisoners don’t exist. They’ve forbidden it. Now prisoners don’t have to work, but they still have to be fed. Now, you see, it’s all based on humanitarianism, you know . . . They waste so much money on the colonies, on humanitarian aid! They live better than we do, that’s what it’s like now. P ENSIONER 1: Now it’s all concerts and football.22

The trope that prisoners live better than the ordinary inhabitants of the zone was often repeated by our respondents; and, interestingly, it is paralleled outside the

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zone by people in the district who insist that the zone’s inhabitants live better than they do.

Re-balancing the power geometry between civilian and penal authorities The Russian ethnographer Valery Tishkov in 2002 wrote scathingly about the history of local government reform in post-Soviet Russia, calling it a story of halfmeasures and the perpetuation of the dominance of formal by informal alliances and practices. It is not surprising, therefore, that the prison authorities were long able to protect themselves from threats to their monopoly over portion of rural space.23 In 2006 this ended when reforms enacted earlier that were designed to reconfigure the relationship between civilian and ‘other’ authorities came into force.24 Under the reforms, organizations that had hitherto performed the functions of local government were stripped of their powers and required to hand them over to the relevant local authorities, if they had not already done so.25 In ZubovoPolianskii district this meant local government had to take over responsibility for the population and settlements lying within the zone in the northern one-third of its territory. When we interviewed local residents in 2007 and 2008 the impact of these changes were only just beginning to be felt, but initial responses were negative on both sides of the boundary separating the zone from the rest of the district. Starting with the inhabitants of the zone, there was near universal agreement that the transfer of responsibility for public services to the civilian authorities had resulted in their deterioration since 2006: ‘It’s become a lot worse,’ complained one railway worker in Pot’ma; ‘when it was the zone’s responsibility it was much better . . . Zubova doesn’t need us . . . it’s true they make a good job of some things; I can’t take that away from them. As soon as the bins are full the council collects them. But they are not so good with the drainage; they don’t clean the pipes and they stink at night.’26 Local officials in the newly empowered municipal and village settlement administrations in the zone are in the difficult position of attempting to meet residents’ expectations with too small budgets. The head of Pot’ma municipal administration confirmed in 2008 that the authority had repaired only two apartments in the previous twelve months and had closed the hospital, three social clubs, and cut back the ambulance service. Her counterpart in Yavas interviewed the previous year had given a more upbeat account of the newly empowered authority’s activities: the municipal authority had been able to keep cultural centres and bathhouses open all year round in all its dependent villages, replaced central heating pipes, built four new bathhouses, repaired entrance halls and stairways in 26 apartment blocks, opened a new telephone exchange, extended internet and digital access, and built a new TV tower. Defending his record, the authority’s head insisted on the advantages that people living in the zone had derived from integration into a wider civil administration: they could now access district-wide services

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which they had been unable to do in the past and they had also become eligible for inclusion in Republic social programmes. The difference between the two accounts may well reflect the fact that the regional penal service headquarters is in Yavas. The head of Yavas municipal government confirmed that Ufsin-Mordoviia’s patronage of the zone had not, in fact, ended: As a rule we have many joint activities: for example, laying down winter roads, various sporting events, maintaining public order and the cleanliness of the villages and so on. We have joint meetings with colony heads. At these meetings we clearly define the areas of responsibility of Ufsin and the municipality from a list of tasks . . . We see what we, the local authority, can pay for out of our budget. If we are carrying out an improvement, then Ufsin helps us to finance it and gives technical aid and the specialists needed for the project.

In addition to such examples of assisting the everyday work of local government, Ufsin-Mordoviia is still embarking on new capital projects of its own in the zone, such as the funding of the new hospital in Yavas, and buying a holiday camp in a neighbouring district for children in the zone. In Leplei, another zone village which services three colonies, the municipal council, similarly, can still call on the penal authorities for financial and material resources to maintain ‘objects of social and cultural consumption’. The chief administrator explained this by the fact that ‘the majority of inhabitants in the settlement are employed by the penitentiaries or are the children or parents of personnel’. The future of the settlements in his authority was ‘tied in with the future of the penal colonies’. Given their continuing dependence on penal patronage, it is not surprising that these local government officials, who are no less a part of the prison-personnel community of the zone than are other inhabitants, do not join in criticism of Mal’kov. Rather, they reserve their ire for the district authority: accusing it of withholding resources to which they believe they are entitled. Outside the zone the changes are viewed differently. An activist for the United Russia Party summed up the views of many involved in the district level administration of the costs of the integration of the zone: ‘What sort of advantage could there be from this? We now have to repair all these flats . . . we’ve had to re-roof houses, replace water pipes. This is punishing for us. Now we’re responsible for public transport as well, that’s all ours now. Especially the centre [Yavas], that’s a big expenditure.’ He has a valid point: by taking on housing in the zone, the district more than doubled its housing stock; previously it had 7,000 square metres of housing to maintain, but after 2006 this rose to 17,000 square metres. Furthermore, much of this housing was sub-standard—our informants’ estimates varied between 30 and 80 per cent. A representative of the head of the district administration said that zone inhabitants were used to dealing with the penal authorities and had unrealistic expectations of the local authority: You see, they’ve been spoiled by the state. They had a very generous system of subsidies before. Let’s take the pensioners, they get [social transfers] . . . enough to buy a car, and with some over. On top of this they used to receive a variety of special grants. I’ve had a hard time coping with it – I’ve had to take a lot of their subsidies away.

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Running through these and similar comments about the expectations of people living in the zone is a critique of state interventionism: the majority of the county’s population has long since got used to ‘living with the market’, whereas the zone’s inhabitants are living in a time warp still expecting everything to be done for them. There are, though, people who have grasped the opportunities that the easing of restrictions on entering the zone had opened up. These include private taxi drivers who transport prison visitors to correctional colonies and private boarding houses in Zubova Poliana and Umet that provide overnight accommodation; these businesses have grown as prisoners have taken up rights guaranteed in a revised Russian penal correction code to receive regular visits. The greater freedom of access to the zone has also created opportunities for marketing produce from household plots and, the most lucrative business of all, for the onward sale at inflated prices in the Saturday market in Yavas of commodities bought in the shops in Zubova Poliana. But by far the greatest potential benefit of the zone’s proximity for the district population is employment.

Labour and employment If people living both sides of the zone/district boundary can claim, with some justification, that they are both losers from local government integration, everyone, in theory, is a winner in the employment sphere. For most of its existence, the Mordoviian gulag’s personnel needs have been met from within the ‘power ministries’: military conscripts and the internal ministry forces provided officers and guards. Personnel came from all over the USSR and their arrival in the south-west corner of Mordoviia swelled its population and changed its ethnic composition from mainly Mokshi to Russian and Ukrainian. Two generations on, the descendants of the early arrivals work in the colonies, serving alongside more recent immigrants: graduates from penal academies allocated to Mordoviia, senior officers and specialists such as doctors or psychologists transferred from other penal authorities, and other people drawn from within the zone—the so-called nonattested employees who are not members of the military. There is hardly a family living in the settlements in the zone that does not have a member who at some time has worked for the penal authority. Table 4.1 shows the successive waves of immigrants to work in the zone. Two developments have disrupted the close link between living and working in the zone that have forced Ufsin-Mordoviia to cast its employment net wider. Firstly, with the closure of the military barracks in the zone, the task of recruiting cadres for guard duties has been handed over to the penal authority itself; and secondly, there has been a contraction of the labour pool in the zone from which UfsinMordoviia can draw personnel. Young men who in the past would have made a lifelong commitment to the penal service are today leaving the zone to work as private security guards in Moscow and other metropolitan centres, where their experience (and their license to carry arms) is valued. The reduction of the benefits associated with a career in the service has also contributed to the labour flight.

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Table 4.1. Arrival of the first family member of households of respondents to the 2007 survey of zone inhabitants Decade of arrival of first member of current ‘zone’ households

Percentage number of households with first member arriving in the given decade

1990 to present

8.0

1980s 1970s

6.7 9.7

1960s

13.8

1950s

8.4

1940s

11.8

1930s 1920s and before No data No respondents

Developments in the penal zone

Post-Soviet period; transfer of penal service from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Justice Gorbachev, reduction of prison population 1976 Political prisoners transferred from colonies in Mordoviia to Perm’ 35 and 36 Consolidation of Mordoviian penal complex after post-Stalin rationalization of camps; main period of dissident incarceration in Mordoviia 1953 Stalin’s death, beginning of dismantling of Gulag; contraction of number of colonies in Mordoviia 1945 586-Rifle Division serving in the Far East redeployed to serve in Dubravlag 1931 Temlag founded Building of vetka starts; first contingent of prisons brought to work on the railway in 1929

5.4 4.0 32.2 298

Source: authors’ survey, April 2007.

Table 4.2. The pattern of employment in the ‘zone’ of residents of non-zone villages in Zubovo-Polianskii rural district Types of settlement

All settlement types

Employment in colonies: Work in colonies Used to work in colonies Never have worked in colonies N=

Zubova Poliana

Pot’ma Umet

Villages outside zone I

Villages outside zone II

0.0 1.1 98.9

0.0 0.8 99.2

Percentage of sample 10.6 4.6 84.8 500

5.0 0.0 95.0 100

14.0 11.0 75.0 100

90

120

Source: own survey, April 2008. Villages ‘outside the zone’ located on a transect from Zubova Poliana to the edge of the county with (I) within a radius half-way to the outer boundary and (II) beyond.

People living outside the zone have stepped into this labour gap in recent years, with the result that the penal authority’s sphere of influence has been rippling outwards into the rest of the district. Employment opportunities were named by a majority (56.3 per cent) of the respondents to our 2008 questionnaire as the principal advantage of the zone’s proximity.27 In reality, though, the number of people who

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work in the zone from outside is relatively small. As Table 4.2 shows, just 5 per cent of residents of the district capital, Zubova Poliana, work in the correctional colonies, even though the nearest is a mere 8 kilometres away, and the figure falls to under 1 per cent in the more distant villages from the zone. It is mainly vacancies for external guards (okhraniki), who secure the outer perimeter of the colonies and work the watchtowers, that the penal authority is looking to fill from the district. Unemployed agricultural workers are bussed daily into the zone from the surrounding depressed agricultural settlements, the majority women because young men in the wider district have left to find work elsewhere in Russia, like their zone counterparts. In the USA, the benefit to the local labour market of siting prisons in rural counties has been questioned.28 In Russia, similar doubts are being raised: an official in Zubova Poliana observed that the penal authority still employs ‘its own’ for the officer jobs: ‘Ours are not needed for that work by them. They only want ours to work the watchtowers.’ Other respondents confirmed that recruitment is largely at the unskilled end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, in the zone, bussing in workers from outside, for some, is a cause of regret. In the words of a pensioner in Sosnovka interviewed in 2008, ‘It’s as if they are commuters to a town . . . they get 7, 8, 11,000 rubles to go up the watchtowers and they stand up there with their rifles and [shaking his head] they are women; women, girls, girls.’29

Developing co-community Today a twice-a-day bus service runs from Zubova Poliana to Yavas, evidence of the greater permeability of the zone boundary described in the sections above. But freer access to the zone has not been accompanied by an erosion of the symbolic boundary between it and the rest of the district. The development of a shared identity that would heal the division of the district in the imagaries of the local population is a long-term project: it would require people living ‘outside’ to abandon their conviction that the inhabitants of the zone ‘do not belong’ in the district; and for inhabitants of the zone, it would involve contesting an official discourse that continues to promote loyalty to the ‘little motherland’ over other place loyalties. As Table 4.3 shows, residents inside and outside the zone still prefer to keep their distance from one another. Evidence from our interviews confirms that there was little appetite among local people for integrating the two communities. In villages in the wider district, respondents were reluctant to answer questions about the zone. A previous senior administrator in the municipal government of Umet batted away questions about the zone saying, ‘You know, don’t ask me those questions. You’re better to ask someone in the raion administration . . . I only know about Umet.’ A pensioner and long-term resident of Zubova Poliana, similarly, professed ignorance of the zone: I NTERVIEWER : And how do you get there [to the zone] from here? R ESPONDENT : How to get to the zone? I don’t know; I don’t know and dear God may I never find out . . . the colonies have been there a long time . . . we have nothing to do with the colonies. No, no, they’re 8 kilometres away.30

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Table 4.3. The attitudes of people living in different settlements in Zubovo-Polianskii raion to joint zone/district social and cultural activities Responses

Definitely Yes Probably Yes Probably No Definitely No Difficult to answer N=

Responses to the question: ‘Should there be joint activities between people living in the rural district and the zone?’ (in percentage of sample populations) Total

Zubova Poliana

Pot’ma Umet

Zone villages

8.8 7.8 19.6 37.2 26.6 500

3.0 12.0 24.0 36.0 25.0 100

8.0 4.0 12.0 44.0 32.0 100

12.2 11.1 27.8 36.7 12.2 90

Villages Villages outside zone I outside zone II 11.1 6.7 18.9 40.0 23.3 90

10.0 5.8 16.7 30.8 36.7 120

Source: own survey, April 2008. Villages ‘outside the zone’ located on a transect from Zubova Poliana to the edge of the county with (I) within a radius half-way to the outer boundary and (II) beyond.

Then there was the public sector worker whose denial of knowledge of the zone was belied by the fact that her husband worked in it: ‘I just don’t know; it’s true that there are [correctional] colonies there; they’ve even shown them on TV. In the zone they have their own way of life, we don’t have anything to do with them.’31 The state-within-a-state trope was still a common way of describing the zone two years after it was absorbed into the district. As is normal in rural district capitals all over Russia, Zubova Poliana has a museum of local history and geography. The museum has no exhibits relating to the Mordoviian gulag. The curator explained it thus: ‘Well, they have their own museum there in the zone. We haven’t taken this task upon ourselves. We are the district, as they say, the civilian authority; they live according to their own rules, they have their zone, their own leaders with a General at the apex.’ Confirmation that the zone isn’t imagined as part of the district came from the United Russia activist we quoted earlier who, referring to the zone as a ‘state-within-the-state’, explained why he did not canvass there: ‘I can’t say, I don’t know. They have their own special way . . . it’s their own country.’ His view was echoed by a local journalist who insisted that the people there are governed by ‘special laws’ and have ‘such a monitored life’. The comment about the ‘monitored’ life hints at an understanding among people living outside it that living in zone, for all its perceived material benefits, might have some disadvantages. The symbolic boundary between the inhabitants of the zone and rest of the district is not just a hangover from the Soviet period, therefore, but has been actively (re)produced in the imagaries of local citizens in the last two decades of change. Nevertheless, there is no groundswell of opposition to the existence of the zone. For example, when asked for their views on the hypothetical closure of colonies, a majority of respondents to the questionnaire survey were negative or

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Table 4.4. The attitudes of people living in different settlements in Zubovo-Polianskii raion towards the hypothetical closure of the correctional colonies Responses:

Very positive It would be better if they closed Indifferent It would be better if they remained open Very negative Cannot answer N=

Responses to the question: ‘What would your attitude be to the closure of the colonies?’ (in percentage of sample populations) Total

Zubova Poliana

Pot’ma Umet

Zone villages

Villages outside zone I

Villages outside zone II

1.6 4.6 15.8 39.0

2.0 16.0 32.0 27.0

1.0 1.0 7.0 55.0

2.2 2.2 4.4 40.0

1.1 1.1 14.4 47.8

1.7 2.5 19.2 28.3

25.6 13.4 500

10.0 13.0 100

23.0 13.0 100

47.8 3.3 90

24.4 11.1 90

25.0 23.3 120

Source: own survey, April 2008. Villages ‘outside the zone’ located on a transect from Zubova Poliana to the edge of the county with (I) within a radius half-way to the outer boundary and (II) beyond.

indifferent about the prospect as Table 4.4 shows. The greatest support for closure was in Zubova Poliana itself, but even here under 20 per cent of questionnaire respondents would welcome closure. Any doubts that local inhabitants have about the correctional colonies are evidently outweighed by the perceived benefits to employment and district economy, although, as we have seen, these have yet to be realized. Anthropologists and geographers examining the consequences for communities of the ‘borderless world’ have observed that identity and distinctiveness now reside more in the minds of people than in the structures that underpin their difference, so that boundaries must be sought in the symbolism that demarcates one world from another. They have also observed that such symbolic boundaries have a tendency to persist and be reproduced, even when structural differences have disappeared.32 The question that intrigued the Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth is why inter-group boundaries are sharply marked even as people cross them and as the cultural differences between groups change.33 This question is relevant to Zubovo-Polianskii district where the evidence is that, to date, integration of the zone has not been accompanied by a weakening of the symbolic boundary between the penal and civilian communities. Rather, the analogy of the teabag is often used to describe a permeable boundary between communities that interact but nevertheless remain distinctive seems to describe the current situation.34 The absence of a shared historical experience, patterns of meaning reproduced over seven decades, and current perceptions of difference are all implicated in maintaining the symbolic boundary between the penal and

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civilian sphere in the district, even as the formal geographic boundaries between the two communities have been removed.

Conclusion The story of the slow erosion of the secrecy and isolation of one of the legendary islands of the gulag is being repeated all over Russia, albeit at different rates and each following its own trajectory. The closed, self-sustaining enclave that developed in the south-west corner of the republic of Mordoviia is not unique; elsewhere in the penal heartland of Russia there are similarly selfcontained penal regions—places like the north of Perm’ krai and Sverdlovsk oblast, not to mention the isolation of the single ‘stand alone’ colonies in the Arctic Circle or in the Far East. But even colonies located in the heart of metropolitan Russia have traditionally forged only limited links with the communities lying beyond the village or urban district in which they are located; they have been subject to vertical lines of command from the higher authorities in Moscow. In rural Russia a strong relationship of patronage developed between penal institutions and the settlements that grew up to service them, their inhabitants’ loyalty to the ‘little motherland’ being rewarded with an enhanced standard of living. The penal authorities scripted a version of history that cast the inhabitants of the ‘little motherland’ in an heroic struggle to save the USSR and Russia from the forces of social disorder. In this history, continuity was valorized over change and ends were elevated above means, so that even the socalled ‘dark episodes’ in the penal service’s history contain a positive message about service to a higher cause. Inevitably, such a discourse has created an intense sense of difference among the people living in the zone from the people who do not share the same identity. It is not surprising that, after eight decades, there is a clear insider/outsider divide between people who live on either side of the boundary enclosing the zone. Nor is it surprising that the project of integration has been met with, at best, indifference and, at worst, suspicion on both sides. Current reforms propose a variety of alternative institutions for dealing with offenders for whom incarceration is deemed necessary by the courts. These alternatives include greater use of open prisons, day release, halfway houses, and the formation of prison work brigades for community projects. Many of these changes are predicated on the participation of local communities in overcoming fellow citizens’ offending behaviours. But present arrangements of penal zones hidden away in rural Russia are not well-suited to these proposals. As an example, we can cite the fact that Ufsin-Mordoviia converted one colony, IK8, into a colony-settlement, K-P8; that is, an open prison, for men and women. Under the regime in colony-settlements, prisoners are given day-release to work out in the community. The women we interviewed in 2007 had a variety of jobs, mainly cleaning or in farming. Every morning they would be escorted to their place of work, and would

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return by the same pre-arranged route in the evening to their semi-secure accommodation. Everyone—prisoners and personnel alike—expressed themselves satisfied with the experiment, and the prisoners whom we interviewed believed that the conditions under which they were now living would ease their post-release re-entry to society. Certainly the colony-settlement seemed to have a lot going for it compared with some of the other programmes preparing women for release that we discuss in Chapter 11. But, and it is a large ‘but’, the open prison is located in a community that consists exclusively of past and present prison personnel, and everyone the prison encounters on the street or at work is the authority’s ears and eyes. The disciplinary order in a very real sense extends beyond the prison walls. It can be objected that this arrangement is not acclimatizing prisoners to life as it is lived on the outside in most towns and cities. The results must be to reduce the relevance of the preparation that open prisons in their present locations can provide for the return of offenders to society. The reason why, in a book devoted to the experiences of women prisoners in Russia, we have used research time to explore penal colonies in their local setting, therefore, is because of our conviction that in Russia’s progress towards a more humane penitentiary system the development of co-community has an important role to play. The opening of penal spaces to the communities living alongside them is one vehicle for developing a public consciousness about the nature and practice of the Russian penal system that has, for so long, been closed to outsiders and is a source of miscomprehension, mystification, and rumour. The evidence from Mordoviia is that the sort of local knowledge that is important in informing national debate about penal institutions is still weakly developed in Russia. So long as Russia’s prisons are hidden away from public gaze, it is easy for them to remain outside the public consciousness and for the principle of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ which served the totalitarian state so well to continue to reproduce itself.

Notes 1. An account of these 75th anniversary celebrations in Mordoviia is in Pallot, J., Piacentini, L., and Moran, D., ‘Patriotic discourses in Russia’s penal peripheries: remembering the Mordovan gulag’, Europe-Asia Studies, 62/1 (2010), pp. 1–33. 2. Vremya i zhizn’, 3 June 2006, p. 4. 3. Dubrava, May 2006, p. 1. 4. Coyle, A., Understanding Prisons—Key Issues in Policy and Practice (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2005), pp. 160–2; Visher, C. A. and Travis, J., ‘Transitions from prison to community: understanding individual pathways’, Annual Review of Sociology, 29 (2003), pp. 89–113. 5. Smirnov, M. B., Spravochnik sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR 1923–1960 (Memorial: Moscow,1998), p. 479. 6. Shapovalov, V., Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2001), p. 247. 7. Mochulsky, F. V., Gulag Boss. A Soviet Memoir (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011), pp. 15–21.

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8. Barenberg, A., ‘Prisoners without borders: Zazonniki and the transformation of Vorkuta after Stalin’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 54/7 (2009), pp. 514–34; Baron, N., ‘Conflict and complicity: the expansion of the Karelian gulag 1923–1933’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 42/2–4 (2001), pp. 615–48 and ‘Production and terror: the operation of the Karelian gulag 1933–39’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 43/1 (2002), pp. 139–80; Bell, W. T., ‘Was the gulag an archipelago? An examination of de-convoyed prisoners in Western Siberia’, Paper presented to the conference on the History and Legacy of the Gulag, 2–5 November 2006, Harvard University; Pallot, J., ‘Forced labour for forestry: the twentieth century history of colonization and settlement in the north of Perm’ oblast’, Europe-Asia Studies, 54/7 (2002), pp. 1055–83. 9. Solzhenitsyn insisted that the settlements servicing labour camps were populated by various ‘lowlife elements’ such as prostitutes, black marketeers, and NKVD guards. See Solzhenitsyn, A., The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2 (Collins Harvill: Glasgow, 1975), ch. 21. 10. Sokolov, A., ‘Forced labour in Soviet industry: the end of the 1930s to the mid-1950s: an overview’, in P. Gregory and V. Lazerev (eds), The Economics of Forced Labour: the Soviet Gulag (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 2003), p. 41. 11. Pallot, 2002, op.cit. 12. Rowland, R. H., ‘Secret cities of Russia and Kazakhstan in 1989’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 40/4 (1999), pp. 281–304 for a more general discussion of these types of secret places. 13. Colloquially any collection of penal facilities and their attendant settlements are known as ‘the zone’ (zona) but so is a single penal facility. In this chapter we use ‘the zone’ in the first sense of the word. 14. Interviewee 12, April 2008. 15. Household food production is a feature of the post-Soviet countryside; see Pallot, J. and Nefedova, T., Russia’s Unknown Agriculture: Household Production in Post-Socialist Rural Russia (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007). 16. Head of Yavas municipal authority, interviewed April 2007. 17. For example Marchenko, A. T., My Testimony (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1971); Ratushinskaia, I., Grey is the Colour of Hope (Vintage: London, 1989). 18. FSGS, Federal’naia sluzhba gosudarstvennoi statistiki: Mordoviia, Statisticheskii Ezhegodnik (FSGS po respublike Mordoviia: Saransk, 2006), p. 50. 19. Nefedova, T. G., Treyvish, A., and Pallot, J., ‘The crisis geography of contemporary Russia’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 51/2 (2010), pp. 1–30. 20. There is a plethora of literature on prison siting dealing either with the economics of inserting prisons into rural communities or the Nimby-effect. Recent works include:Gilmore, R. W., Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus and Crisis in Globalizing California. (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2007); Huling, T., ‘Building a prison economy in rural America’, in M. Mauer and M. Chesney-Lind, The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment ( New Press: New York, 2002), ch. 12; Williams E. J., The Big House in a Small Town. Prison Communities and Economics in Rural America (Greenwood: Santa Barbara, 2011); King, R. S., Mauer, M., Huling, T., ‘An analysis of the economics of prison siting in rural communities’, Criminology & Public Policy, 3/3 (2004), pp. 453–80; Che, D., ‘Constructing a prison in the forest: conflicts over nature, paradise, and identity’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95/4 (2005), pp. 809–31; Myers, D. L. and Martin, R., ‘Community member reactions to prison siting: perceptions of prison impact on economic factors’, Criminal Justice Review, 29/1 (2004), pp. 115–44. 21. Interviewee 23, April 2008. 22. Interviewees 42 and 43, 2008. 23. Tishkov, V., ‘Local self-government versus local state administration: Russia’s hybrid experience’, in V. Tishkov and E. Filippova (eds), Local Government and Minority Empowerment in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 5/19 (Local Government and Public Reform Initiative: Budapest, 2002), p. 19. 24. Campbell, A., ‘State versus society? Local government and the reconstitution of the Russian state’, Local Government Studies, 32/5 (2006), pp. 659–76; Ross, C., Local Government in the

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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Soviet Union (Croom Helm: Beckenham, 1987); Ross, C., ‘The tortuous path of local government reform in the Russian Federation’, Local Government Studies, 32/5 (2006), pp. 639–58. In most cases, such as in ‘company towns’ and on collective and state farms, the handover had taken place long before 2003. Interviewee 40, April 2008. The questionnaire surveys are discussed in Chapter 2. For example, Glasmeier, A. K., 2007, ‘The economic impacts of the prison development boom on persistently poor rural places’, International Regional Science Review, 30/3 (2007), pp. 274–99. Interviewee 55, April 2008. Interviewee 15, April 2008. Interviewee 9, April 2008. Donnan, H. and Wilson, T. M., Borders. Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Berg: Oxford, 1999). Barth, F., ‘Introduction’, in F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: the Social Organisation of Cultural Difference (Allen and Unwin: London, 1969). Wallman, S., ‘The boundaries of “race” and the processes of ethnicity in England’, Man, 13/2 (1978), p. 205.

5 ‘Socialism in One Barracks’ Bud’ prokliat tot ot veka i do veka Kto zakhotel tiur’moi izpravit cheloveka Cursed is he who from century to century tries to correct the person by means of prison Ne skroesh podlinoi prirodi pod sloem pudri i sur’mi I kak tiurma – model’ svobodi Svoboda – kopiia tiur’my The true nature of things cannot be hidden by powder and antimony Just as prison models the world outside so freedom is a copy of the prison [both popular rhymes among prisoners]1

In this chapter we descend further down the spatial scale to cross the last physical boundary separating the convicted prisoner from the world outside: to examine the spaces of her confinement. We focus on the techniques of power-and-control in Russia’s penal institutions, which as David Garland reminds is the ‘alpha and omega’ of decision-making in prisons.2 Russian penal institutions differ in fundamental respects from Western prisons in their physical and managerial structure, but, like them, they have developed as massive machines to control the bodies and behaviour of their inmates. The nature of the power exercised in Russian penal institutions has changed since Soviet times, when extra-legal coercion of the most brutal kind coexisted with technologies of surveillance aimed at the internal discipline of the subject. Soviet labour camps were in every sense ‘spaces of exception’, in which the inmate was reduced to a state of bare life.3 In the post-Stalin state the worst of the extra-legal practices of the gulag were eliminated and the administration of punishment was brought within the realm of legal process, although violations of prisoners’ human rights remained serious in the conditions in which prisoners were held and, by definition, in the use of incarceration (in prison or psychiatric hospital) as a means of punishing political opponents of the state.4 In the post-Soviet state, the distancing of penal practice from the extra-legal excesses of the Soviet period has continued. Yet, this does not mean that all the techniques designed for maintaining order in Soviet penal institutions have disap-

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peared. A striking feature of Russia today is, in fact, the disjuncture that has emerged in the modalities of power exercised in society at large and in penal institutions. Thus, whilst a case can be made that disciplinary self-regulation and governmentality have become dominant in social control, legitimacy and power in society at large as Russians have embraced mobile phones, CCTV, and at-a-distance digital monitoring, the same is less true in its prisons; despite the introduction of CCTV in penal colonies from 2008, prisons still continue to use surveillance techniques (and methods of penal back-up) perfected during the Soviet period. We have in mind, in particular, the institutions of the collective (kollektiv) and the ‘informer’ (stukach) which lay at the heart of the Soviet state’s mobilization of the population for socialist construction. The underlying rationale of both was to employ ‘peer-pressure’ (and fear) to provide the motivation needed to achieve the economic, social, and political goals of the day. The collectivist principle underpinned the organization of people in the workplace, in their place of residence and at leisure, and it took a variety of forms at different scales, including the work brigade, the kolkhoz, the team, the ‘circle’. Competitiveness was an essential ingredient of collectivism; but rather than the individualistic pursuit of material gain, it took the form of socialist competition involving ideological reward for the whole team. The collective as a mechanism of self-regulation is hardly unique to the socialist state, but in the Soviet Union it acquired added ingredients that, according to Maria Loss, transformed it into what she describes as a form of ‘totalitarian surveillanceorientated bio-politics’.5 She sees collectivism as a strategy of absorption of the private by the public in order to enable generalized surveillance and the disciplinary re-education of society.6 This she identifies as an example of ‘enhanced’ panopticism, where comprehensive mutual surveillance replaced the individual separation of the panoptican. Loss labels this modified form of panopticism ‘enhanced’ because it goes beyond ‘the internalization of the all-seeing eye and the habit of self-policing’, by making each member of society also aware of being ‘potentially viewed by others as a secret eye of the system’.7 The connection with collectivism is that collective organizations in all walks of life were sites of surveillance and information-gathering by the secret police. Paradoxically, therefore, collectivism as practised in Stalin’s USSR led to social atomization, the sine qua non of regimes of total domination. Loss draws on Hannah Arendt in identifying the main social aim of totalitarianism as the annihilation of the uniqueness of the human person.8 Most recent scholarship that uses Foucault as an explanatory framework has long since left prisons behind and focused its attention on the new technologies of control that have emerged more widely in the digital and post-digital age in liberal societies.9 In focusing on the modalities of power involved in the modern institutionalized practice of total domination (although she, too, is primarily interested in disciplinary capillaries in the broader society), Loss directs our attention back to the prison. While the technologies of ‘enhanced panopticism’ may not have originated in the gulag, they were certainly an important element of how order was maintained in it. The main organizational form that collectivism took in the gulag was the brigade: a group of prisoners who, under the leadership of one of their number, the

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brigade leader, was set a daily production target for work in the forest, mine, or construction site. The brigadir was responsible for mobilizing the members of the brigade to fulfil the daily production norm and, in the event of failing do so, had to share the punishment of his or her fellow prisoners.10 Evgenia Ginzburg confirms in her memoir the absorption of the private by the public that resulted from the organization of prisoners into brigades: In those days the main social organisation was the work brigade rather than detachment . . . And later there was that constant, clinging (and for the intellectual, torturing) lack of privacy, the condition of not being an individual but a member of a brigade instead, and the necessity of acting for whole days and whole years not as you yourself have decided but as the brigade requires.11

The use of a military terminology was ubiquitous in Soviet labour organization (Marx and Engels had promised in the Communist Manifesto that industrial labour armies would transform the capitalist economy after the Revolution) and it was not surprising, given the economic task set for the gulag, that brigades would become the principal building block of the camps in the early days. Later the detachment (otriad) was inserted at a higher level in the camps, coterminous with the cells, barracks, and dormitories that were occupied by several work brigades. Prisoners were selected to perform a supervisory role in detachments also. Brigade leaders and detachment supervisors were part of a more generalized use of prisoners for specific jobs in the camps, but their disciplinary role marked them out. Kseniia Medvedskaia, who, as the wife of an enemy of the people, was sent to Siblag in the year of the Great Terror, describes the system of self-organization in her dormitory occupied by 60 prisoners as consisting of an elected ‘captain’, her deputies, and various volunteers for kitchen, infirmary, and cleaning duties.12 She explains that the women were afraid of the ‘captain’ who ‘looked after the interests of the administration’ and reported anyone who broke camp rules. When prison officers visited the dormitory, it was the ‘captain’ who got the prisoners to stand to attention and it was she who explained the dormitory rules to new prisoners. But for Medvedskaia the most corrupting was the mutual surveillance that the system demanded: The regimen in prison corrupted people, and that was terrible. Denouncing each other was not only demanded but praised. If someone saw somebody else break the rules and did not report it, they would be punished along with the person who committed the infraction.13

It is a small step from the situation described here to everyone being afraid that they too would be being viewed as a potential stool pigeon; Loss argues this is the feature of ‘enhanced panopticism’. In reality, though, the different modalities of penal power were layered and coexisted with one another in the gulag. Indeed, they were sometimes embodied in a single individual: the supervisor could both mete out physical punishment and inform on her fellow prisoners. Furthermore, and more importantly for when we move on to consider how women navigate penal power in correctional colonies today, even in the gulag where sovereign/ disciplinary power were omnipresent, prisoners were able to respond to it in

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nefarious ways, finding means to circumvent, resist, modify, and subvert it. ‘Enhanced panopticism’ was limited by relationships of mutual trust and friendships that developed and were sustained by prisoners. Using memoirs of gulag survivors, Duncan has written of the strong bonds that developed among prisoners: for some the relationships thus formed were the most meaningful in their lives.14 It was also in the gulag that the alternative centres of power that today subvert penal power in many men’s colonies in the Russian Federation were gestated. The ‘thieves’ law’, albeit in a bowdlerized form, is a challenge to penal power in men’s colonies.15 One of the main growth areas in crime publishing in Russia is survival manuals for prisoners, which provide guides on how to circumvent the penal gaze and crash courses in prison jargon (the use of which is forbidden in internal colony rules). Thus whilst, as we shall see below, the techniques of ‘enhanced panopticism’ have been carried forward to the present time, so too have myriad practices by which prisoners contest its disciplinary logic. A small example from the present time: women prisoners in correctional colonies are issued with a prison uniform once they arrive in the colony where they will sit out their sentence. It is normally a grey or blue serge skirt or trousers (depending on the colony), blouse, heavy jacket for outside wear, and a headscarf that has to be worn at all times except when women return to their dormitories at night. Headscarfs are not popular with the women. The explanation we received from personnel for why they are necessary was that without them prisoners might fall into the trap of thinking they are equivalent to their captors: The head of the detachment [nachal’nik otriada] – she is an educator but she cannot let prisoners relax in her presence because she is demanding of them that they fulfil their duties to the section, to the collective – that they work, that they clear up after themselves. They [personnel] are responsible for checking, monitoring, and controlling; that is, they are the controlling organ. It’s like being a teacher; we learn as teachers that we must be dressed appropriately, so the children see us and pay attention. If you are not dressed correctly, the lesson won’t go well. (Current Head of the Education Department in a women’s colony)

Pure Foucault, but as the following extract from a prisoner commenting on the same requirement indicates, wearing the headscarf is a disciplinary imperative that does not go unchallenged. Our respondent was apologetic about how ‘minor’ are her rebellions: [F]or example, these headscarves which we have to wear. I was simply in shock; on the outside I’ve never worn a headscarf, I was just never in the habit. But here we have to cover our heads, I mean with the scarf. The administration saw me without one on the paradeground and gave me a week’s punishment immediately. Then again, I hid during a sanitary raid [an inspection] leaving a dirty cup on my bedside cabinet. Those sort of insignificant violations . . . (Pr 53)

Insignificant they may be, but, as the despair of one male internal security officer in a women’s colony indicated, these ‘everyday forms of resistance’ are difficult to contain:

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She is here and there; puts a skirt on, wears jewellery, sews something she’s been given on her clothes – that sort of thing. . . You tell them once, you tell them twice, three or four times. She’ll be put on report and then two months later she does the same thing again.

The purpose in the rest of this chapter is to examine how penal power flows through the physical spaces and structures of correctional colonies. We leave until later the exploration of the complex ways in which women respond to this power in both its coercive and disciplinary modalities, as well as to the interventions aimed at the ‘responsibilization’ of the prisoner (the inculcation of responsibility for good order within the individual prisoner by means of expert knowledge). However, taking our cue from Ginzburg’s observations about the burden of the loss of privacy, we bring forward evidence of how in the very public spaces in which they live their lives in correctional colonies, women attempt to create private spaces for themselves.

Spatio-temporal regulation at colony level The physical structure of penal institutions in the Russian Federation does not conform to a single plan; they have an immense variety of forms. Prisoners’ progression through the stages of the criminal justice system can be traced in the succession of distinctive penal spaces they are forced to occupy: it starts in the cramped, sometimes subterranean, single cells operated by the militia in which prisoners are held usually for just a few days after arrest; from here they move on to the overcrowded cells of the remand prisons, where they spend 23 hours of the day locked up; then it is the transportation in the Stolypin carriages—a separate cage for each category of prisoner; and finally arrival at the correctional colony, where most prisoners are housed en masse in dormitories. The greater part of a prisoner’s sentence in Russia is served in institutions conforming to what Marshall in his classification of prison layout identifies as a zoned military plan.16 The interior spaces of the colony are zoned into administrative, domestic, and production territories, but it is the detachment block, the two- to three-storey brick buildings containing the mass dormitories, that really distinguish the average Russian correctional institution from its North American or European counterparts. Russia does have institutions in which convicted prisoners are held in cells (in prisons and the strictest regime colonies for men), and some which, at the other extreme, consist of little more than a secure residential block (the colony-settlements), but they are the minority. Yvonne Jewkes in an analysis of the supermax has argued that the use of extreme spatial segregation and isolation ‘suppresses’ and ‘depresses’ prisoners, intensifying the pains of imprisonment.17 In the Russian case, the problems of adaptation are, rather, to do with the continual presence of other people and an over-regimented daily routine. This is the exact opposite of what Alford has described for Patuxent prison, where security is so tight and prisoners on such long sentences that inter-

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nal space does not have to be heavily regulated and detailed surveillance would serve no purpose.18 Figure 5.1 demonstrates the internal plan of a model ‘education centre’ (vospital’nyi tsentr), the new name to be given for juvenile offender facilities. The plan shows the compartmentalization of internal penal space. The domestic zone is the site of the dormitories (two in this plan, but in adult colonies there are typically sufficient for up to fifteen detachments), canteen, shop, school, bathhouse, laundry, stores for clothes and linen, and all the other housekeeping services needed to meet prisoners’ domestic needs. Additionally, it houses the quarantine block, staff offices, the operations department responsible for information gathering on the internal discipline of the colony, a room for interdenominational worship or a church, and a parade-ground. The production zone houses the on-site industrial enterprises: these can be substantial plants involved in heavy metallurgy, garment manufacture, chemicals production, and wood processing; or else smaller manufacturing workshops, such as exist alongside the clothing manufacturing plants in the Mordoviian women’s colonies, for decorating souvenirs. There might also be a variety of smaller plants in the production zone involved in food processing and making ‘articles of common consumption’ for the colony(ies) and local population and workshops for professional training. Some penal labour may also be deployed outside the colonies, in farming and timber felling. The administrative zone with the staff headquarters, the offices of the colony boss and deputy governors and their departments, can be located within the main perimeter fence or, as is more usual, outside it. Some facilities are located between zones: the guesthouse for long-term visits often lies astride the domestic and administrative zones, and the punishment cells are located in the so-called ‘prohibited zone’ occupying a stretch of the no-man’s land between the first and outer of the five perimeter fences enclosing a colony. The three main zones are heavily securitized, separated from one another by high fences, and accessible only via a control point (kontrol’nyi propusknoi punkt). In theory, anyone passing from one zone to another—personnel, non-attested workers, security guards or prisoners—has to have their documentation checked. The three major functional zones are further subdivided into discrete spaces, each contained within secure barriers, which might be opaque structures such as fences or else wire netting. In the domestic zone, for example, each detachment block is partitioned from its neighbour and all are partitioned from the canteen, hall, the kindergarten (in this case by fences), the quarantine block, and so on. Similarly, in the production zone each facility is enclosed. Prisoners are not permitted to move from one enclosure to another without permission, but the access points are not permanently manned. The disciplined use of this space is the responsibility of the Security Department (Otdel Bezopastnosti), which provides a roving patrol over the territory of the domestic and production zones, usually of two officers who can call upon the duty officer and back-up in an emergency. These roving patrols check the residential dormitories at two-hourly intervals throughout the day. Reproducing the division of labour that there was in the gulag, the securitization

KEY No. Sporting facilities

20

12

21 23

Pr

2

6

tic

18

es

22

om

D

n tio uc e od on z

4

ne zo 3 8 26 13

7

Open prison zone

27 19

17

10

24 11 5 16

9 14

25

1 Entrance

Fig. 5.1. Model plan of the zonation of a juvenile colony (centre). Source: modified from http://fsin.su/document/index.php?ELEMENT_ID= 7998 [accessed 12 May 2011].

15

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

No. of floors

Passport control office Canteen Administration block Disciplinary block Infirmary Education block Dormitory for 140 persons Dormitory for 120 persons Quarantine block School Club Bathhouse Clothing factory Store room Boiler Vegetable cellar Fire point Electricity station Church Production facility Oil depot Pig sties Checkpoint Disciplinary block Rehabilitation block for 18 persons Checkpoint “Open” block

2 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

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of the external perimeter is under a different department, the guard company (Rota Okhrana), which answers directly to the head of the colony.19 The partition and securitization of the internal functional space of colonies allows the prisoners to be dealt with as a mass. Internal zoning means that prisoners can be subjected to spatio-temporal regulation designed to maintain order and the hierarchies of power in the colony. The bird’s-eye view of Russian correctional colonies with their small buildings scattered over a large interior territory might be thought to bear a superficial resemblance to the housing blocks of lower category prisons in the UK, but the reality is that the action-space of prisoners is at all times limited, as the following prisoner describes: From the door [of the detachment block], then to the bench. Then the perimeter of the smoking area outside. From there outwards everything is the forbidden zone – forbidden, forbidden, forbidden. (Ex-Pr 12)

Dormitories are out of bounds during work hours. At night prisoners are not locked in but nor are they allowed out, except to go to the toilet, signing a logbook at the detachment block entrance if these are outside. Long absence is considered a violation of the regime. The Security Department takes morning and evening roll calls, when all the detachments are lined up in the parade-ground for a headcount. These are the most important daily checks made of prisoners, when their presence is recorded and their ‘external appearance’ checked: for correct clothing, labelling—every prisoner has her name and detachment number displayed on her uniform—and outward signs of physical problems, such as injuries or incapacity. But other checks can take place at any time of the day or night, for example, in the workshops, detachment block, and when passing through inter- and intra-zone checkpoints. The prisoner’s day is, therefore, one of routine and temporal control over the use of different spaces. For the penal authorities the choreography of the flow of prisoners in penal space is a complex organizational task. The internal security officer we quoted previously is an advocate of electronic surveillance and cellular accommodation because of the imperfect degree of control, he believes, the prison authorities have over prisoners: [I]t’s not that it’s chaotic, but the day begins, and then it’s here and there, here and there, and it’s difficult to follow who’s where – well it’s free movement . . . when the prisoners are in isolators or cell blocks, then there’s naturally more order and you can expect more of the convicts.

In its regulations governing the internal organization of colonies, the Ministry of Justice gives a template for prisoners’ time budget in a standard regime colony. We reproduce this in Table 5.1. Prisoners are entitled to one day off a week, and two weeks’ annual holiday. During these periods they have to keep to the established timetable for rising, eating, and roll call. Their ‘free time’ is supposed to be spent on collective cultural and sports activities. The salient point is that the dormitories remain out of bounds to

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Table 5.1. A model timetable for the allocation of prisoners’ time in a standard regime colony Activity

Time budget

Place of activity

Zone

Reveille Physical exercises Washing and making up beds Morning and evening roll calls Breakfast Transfer to workplaces

Not later than 5 or 6 a.m. 15 minutes Up to 10 minutes

Dormitory Dormitory Dormitory

Domestic Domestic Domestic

Up to 40 minutes

Parade-ground

Domestic

30 minutes Up to 40 minutes

Canteen Via KPP

Work

According to labour laws relating to particular jobs [normally a minimum of 8 hours] 30 minutes

Factory, farms, workshops

Domestic Domestic/ Production Production or off site

Collection from work and evening wash Supper Personal time Re-educational work

25 minutes

Dormitory

30 minutes 1 hour 1 hour

Cultural mass activities, school, skills training Preparation for lights out Sleep (uninterrupted)

According to specific schedules 10 minutes 8 hours

Canteen Dormitory Detachment and education block Detachment and education block Dormitory Dormitory

Lunch break

Canteen

Domestic or Production Domestic Domestic Domestic Domestic Domestic Domestic Domestic

Source: Ministry of Justice, Pravila vnytrennogo rasporiadka ispravitel’nykh uchrezhdenii. Prikaz ot 3ogo noiarbria 2005, no. 205. Ob utverzhdenii pravila vnutrennego rasporiadka ispravitel’nykh uchzhhrezhdenii (On implementing the internal rules of correctional colonies), order no. 205, from 3 November 2005.

prisoners between morning and evening roll call. Lack of employment in UK prisons is replaced , therefore, in Russian penal institutions by perpetual activity. Spare time is limited and it is often structured. One recently released prisoner described in an interview in 2008 the tyranny of having to be occupied during ‘down time’: If the girls are sitting and reading or knitting, then they are using their time well. The problem is that between 6 and 10 in the evening, you can’t just sit on your bed and relax and just sleep . . . that is forbidden by the regime. You need to be busy, and the colony staff will just wander into the dormitory [to check]. (Ex-Pr 1)

The key to discipline, it turns out, is to keep prisoners occupied at all times of the day and to reduce genuinely free time to a minimum. One of the changes in the past two decades that has served to put the system under strain is the collapse of demand for the products of penal industries, especially in men’s colonies, although unemployment affects the women’s as well. Today there are long periods when prisoners are unoccupied and they mill around the ‘public areas’ of their detach-

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ment block—the TV room, bathrooms, detachment larder, the corridors and yard—where the ‘rules’ of the prison sub-culture are as likely to prevail as those of the penal authorities. An informal classification exists among prisoners of correctional colonies into ‘red’ and ‘black’: the former are colonies where the life of prisoners is strictly controlled by the penal authorities, and the latter are where power over many aspects of everyday life has been ceded to the criminal sub-culture. We discuss this dynamic in Chapter 10. If this weren’t sufficient challenge to power-andcontrol by the penal authorities, the latter also have to cope with greater awareness on the part of prisoners of human rights law and their preparedness to act on this knowledge, and the use of the internet by people on the outside to publicize extralegal practices and the breakdown of control in the colonies. Russian correctional colonies no longer appear capable of producing docile bodies using the technologies of disciplinary control and penal back-up they have at their disposal. Looking over the border to Europe, FSIN has decided that separating prisoners, rather than treating them en masse, is the key to discipline and order in its prisons.20 The first casualty of such a change is slated to be the detachment, one of the foundation pillars of Russia’s creaking penal edifice and the institution that has been one of the capillaries through which penal power has traditionally been exercised.

Power-and-control in the detachment The detachment is the site of penal colonies’ disciplinary and rehabilitative efforts. It is also the focus of prisoners’ social life, of the emergence of alternative power hierarchies to those put in place by the prison authorities, and of individual and, more occasionally, group resistance, as we discuss in Chapter 9. The detachment is a collectivity of prisoners. In women’s colonies it mixes women sentenced for offences across the spectrum, from serious to minor, who occupy the shared space of a common dormitory and are considered as a single unit for the purposes of organizing education, rehabilitation, entertainments, and assignment to work brigades. According to Ministry of Justice regulations, the detachment is supposed to number 50–100 prisoners (with a 120 maximum for juvenile colonies), but in reality overcrowding means that they normally nowadays number 100–150, and at times have exceeded this. A woman remains a member of her detachment for the whole of her sentence, barring being removed to another for reasons of her own or others’ safety and, very occasionally, to another colony for the same reason. Membership of the detachment is maintained during temporary absences, say, for a period in the punishment block, hospital, or mother-and-baby unit. The purpose and organizational principle of the detachment is explained in the Ministry of Justice order of 30 December 2005.21 In adult colonies the detachment is under the supervisory control of the Detachment Head (Nachal’nik Otriada) and in juvenile colonies the Senior Educator (Starshii Vospitatel’). The detachment head was identified by the prison officers we interviewed as the ‘main link’ and ‘most important person’ in a colony, although at the same time they bemoaned the lack of commitment and staying power of new recruits. She is

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Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

responsible for implementing the colony’s policies with respect to the re-education of prisoners, for which she has to draw up quarterly plans. Notwithstanding the emphasis in the detachment head’s ‘job description’ on the rehabilitative effort with prisoners, the main requirement the colony has of her is the maintenance of order in the detachment. She is expected to resolve conflicts, make a monthly analysis of the disciplinary situation, be present at morning and evening roll calls, report troublesome individuals, and make recommendations about changes to their regime.22 In her disciplinary functions the detachment head is able to draw on the assistance of the member of the Operations Service attached to the detachment and the colony’s other security organs, which are shown in Figure 5.2. The operations officer (operativnik or ‘kum’ in prison jargon) is a crucial link in the exercise of disciplinary control in the detachment. The Operations Service (Operativnaia Sliuzhba) exists in all colonies and remand prisons, where its role is to uncover planned offences and violations of the regime, to detect illegal connections between prisoners and the outside world, to investigate corruption among officers, to gather information about the leaders of the criminal underworld, and to follow up leads on previous offences. Its methods of gathering information include using informers recruited from among the prisoners, phone conversation intercepts, listening to rumour, and direct conversations with inmates. Apart from uncovering illegal activities, the operativnik’s role is to build up a picture of the ‘mood’ in a detachment. Though the operations officer can share information gathered with the detachment head, the main line of reporting runs via the head of the operations department up to the deputy-governor in charge of ‘Security and Operations’. Although no doubt capable of acting benignly, the security and operations departments have a fearsome reputation in the prison community. Severally and individually (bearing in mind that they are subject to mutual monitoring), personnel of these departments are supposed to ensure order in the detachments and thus in the colony at large. They are assisted in this task by the panoptic effect of the postSoviet version of socialist collectivism.

Self-organization in the detachment The principle of prisoners being given responsibility for managing various aspects of their everyday life has matured and become embedded as one of the distinguishing institutions of Russian correctional colonies. It consists of the administration selecting prisoners to take on leadership positions and putting groups of prisoners in charge of various social, housekeeping, educational, and, until recently, monitoring activities in the detachment. The aim of this generalized system of ‘self-organization’ is to promote rehabilitation (article 111 of the correction code), or, in the language of Foucauldian governmentality, the ‘responsibilization’ of prisoners by encouraging them to think up ‘useful initiatives’ and involving them in decisions about work, housekeeping, spiritual life and skills, professional and physical training. Sometimes overlapping with these

Head of Colony

Director of internal security and discipline

Director of personnel and educational work

Operations department (Operativnyi otdel)

Prisoner re-education department

Security (Otdel bezopasnosti)

Various departments dealing with personnel

Director of estates

Estates and quartermaster departments

Director of production

Engineering, manufacturing and skills training departments

Director of medical services

Doctor and dentist’s surgeries

Director of the guard

External guard (Rota okhrana)

Technical department

Guard dog section

Fig. 5.2. Simplified diagram of the internal departments of a correctional colony.

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Space and Place in Russia’s System of Penality

organizations, but as often separate from them, is the network of covert informers recruited by the Operations Service. By far the most authoritative position conferred by this latter-day version of the kollektiv is occupied by the starshaia dneval’naia or, alternatively, zavkhoz. This may be translated as ‘housekeeper’, but ‘steward’ or ‘head girl/prefect’ more accurately coveys the duties and powers of the position. Personnel and prisoners alike with whom we spoke describe the ‘head prefect’ as the right hand of the detachment head and the principal point of contact between prisoners and the authorities. Her roles include ‘maintaining peace and harmony’ in the detachment, handing out jobs in the detachment and giving instructions on how they are to be done, allocating bunks, and making announcements on behalf of the administration. This woman is also an important source of information about other prisoners, although how she exercises that role depends upon her own particular take on the job. The principal material reward she gets for her work is a room to herself. The head prefect supervises various deputies and monitors (dneval’nie and dezhurnie) who might be in charge of a ‘section’, if a dormitory is partitioned, or housekeeping tasks such as supervising the cleaning of the bathroom and toilets, opening doors, boiling water for women coming back from work, preparing tea for visitors, and collecting prisoners to whom the colony head needs to speak. Figure 5.3 shows the main self-organization sections in a detachment as they exist at the present time. In 2009, approximately one-third of prisoners in women’s colonies were involved in self-organization committees in their detachments.23 The committees are made up entirely of prisoners, but they operate under the oversight of the colony administration and within the framework of guidelines issued by the relevant department and sub-departments of the colony and subject to their approval. The ‘consumers’ of the committees’ activities, though, are fellow prisoners who are asked, persuaded, urged, cajoled into participating or complying with whatever activity, whichever committee is currently pressing. This is not to say that they do not play a role in maintaining order by inculcating responsibility in the activists, on the one hand, and contributing to the well-being of prisoners, on the other; the section on psychological help to prisoners, for example, can fulfil the same helpful role for prisoners as do ‘listeners’ in the UK system; and the energy committee, the most recent addition to the list, saves energy. But they have also been a capillary through which penal power is exercised and/or have been the site of alternative centres of power in the informal detachment hierarchies. In later chapters we discuss the various ways in which women prisoners experience self-organization. Needless to say, their experiences are subjective; the meanings vested in institutions such as the starshaia dneval’naia, as with all prefect systems, depends upon an individual’s subject position. Whereas for a head prefect a request to remake a bed because the detachment will lose points in the latest interdetachment competition for tidiness is perfectly reasonable, for the individual prisoner, who is convinced that her bed is perfectly neat, this request is experienced as bullying. The personnel with whom we spoke insisted that by the detachment

Committee of the Institution’s Collective (Sovet kollektiva uchrezhdeniia)

Committee of the Detachment Collective (Sovet kollektiva otriada)

Social Liaison Committee

Discipline and order***

Education and skills training

Fire safety

Work adaptation

Leisure

Psychological support

Sports and physical culture

Energy conservation*

Sanitary and domestic

Social support**

∗

Formed 2009 2006, re-formed 2009 ∗∗∗ Liquidated 2009 ∗∗Closed

Fig. 5.3. Schematic diagram of self-organization collectives in a detachment (otriad) in a correctional colony.

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head’s oversight was a guarantee against the abuse of positions of authority that the prisoners were given. Changes in regulations emanating from the Ministry of Justice suggest otherwise. Firstly, in 2006 the social assistance section (SSP—sektsiia sotsial’noi pomoshchi) that collected donations from prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their relatives to finance humanitarian aid for current prisoners was suspended and re-established three years later with a slightly different name (SSPO—sektsiia sotsial’noi pomoshchi osuzhdennym) and with their function confined to giving prisoners psychological and organizational preparation for their release. This change was an attempt on the authorities’ part to undermine one of the material bases of the latter-day thieves-in-law in the colonies; the social fund was being used as the obshchak, the mutual aid fund, for gang members. This was followed, secondly, in 2009 by the elimination (under order number 440 of the RF Ministry of Justice) of ‘The Section for Discipline and Order’ (SDiP—sektsiia distsipliny i poriadka), which, as the name suggests, was a committee that had responsibility for ensuring compliance with detachment house rules (these are numerous, covering time-keeping, dress, where to smoke, keeping quiet after lights out, and so on). The Minister of Justice’s words, reflecting on the decision to liquidate the SDiP, are a frank admission of the abuse of the self-organization system. The committees, he said, had become a universal source of violations, abuses, and ‘other problems’, including being used in some instances by colony administrations ‘to isolate groups of prisoners by giving them powers over other prisoners’ in pursuit of ‘their own purposes’. Admitting that the activities of SDiPs sometimes fell ‘outside the legal context’, Minister of Justice Konovalov was pessimistic about the prospects for restoring legitimate order by the committees’ liquidation: Referring to the ‘unfortunate’ Sections of Discipline and Enforcement (SDP): more than a year ago we abolished them. I have no illusions and I do not think that all the phenomena connected with the existence of that institution have been eliminated.24

Not so much Foucault as Agamben. Konovalov’s words can be taken as an admission of the failure of collectivism as a disciplinary strategy in Russian penal institutions. They make it difficult to form a judgement about how power-and-control is maintained in Russian penal colonies at the present time. Certainly, there are elements of normalizing practices of disciplinary power: the spatio-temporal choreography of the prisoner’s day involves the ‘distribution of bodies in space’, and if this isn’t sufficient, there is always self-organization and the ubiquity of informers to enhance the panoptic effect. However, this is a partial—and so we must understand from those people who have experienced imprisonment in Russian colonies, an extremely partial—explanation for prisoners’ compliance. There are some possible positive explanations for why prisoners comply with the regime: ‘expert’ interventions with individuals by colony psychologists and re-educators and, yes, involvement in selforganization can lead to self-reflection that results in prisoners internalizing a preference to choose order. Current reform proposals for ‘social lift’ are designed to build upon existing systems of reward to encourage compliant behaviour.25 To date, however, colonies still rely on penal sanction to achieve compliance.

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Penal back-up In the gulag the threats of summary execution and starvation rations were the main reasons why prisoners complied. Russia’s penal colonies today are hardly strangers to violence and corporal punishment. The principal legal sanction that colonies can use against ‘persistent rule breakers’ is committing the violator to confinement in the penal isolator or shizo (shtrafnyi izoliator) or the punishment cell (PKT—pomeshchenie kamernogo tipa). The precise circumstances under which these sanctions can be used and of what they consist are laid down in the correction code. As the name suggests, in the punishment isolator the prisoner is cut off from other prisoners and contacts with the outside world. Normally, he or she spends 23 hours locked up with an hour in the exercise yard. Until 1988, prisoners in punishment isolators were given restricted food rations, their prison clothes were taken away to be replaced by lighter garments that were poor protection against the cold, and they were deprived of mattress and pillows; but these additional deprivations are illegal today. Still, though, prisoners entering the punishment isolator have to surrender all their personal possessions, including their standard issue uniforms, for special clothes, which were reported to us as still being made of lighter materials. Women prisoners also reported that a spell in the shizo is to be feared. Under the current code, a prisoner can be sent to the punishment isolator for a maximum of fifteen days and, in any year, for no more than two months. Punishment PKTs are reserved for prisoners whom the authorities want to separate from their detachment for a longer period of time. They resemble the multioccupancy cells of remand prisons, and normally prisoners are held in them for between three and six months with brief 90-minute exercise periods daily. In women’s colonies, prisoners confined in punishment cells get automatic re-assignment, when the punishment term ends, onto strict regime conditions (strogie usloviia soderzhaniia), which means that they are entitled to a reduced number of visits and to no more than three parcels per annum. Persistent offenders against internal colony rules are not always returned to their original detachment when they have finished in the punishment cell, but may be transferred to a separate special detachment exclusively for women on strict regime conditions. According to the official FSIN census of prisoners in 2009, the incidence of the use of sanctions against women prisoners has declined in the past two decades from 41.5 per cent of the total women prisoner population in 1989 to 21.0 per cent in 2009 (the equivalent figure for men in 2009 was 33.7 per cent).26

Making private spaces and making spaces private In the past decade, there has been a flood of articles dealing with different aspects of how prisoners adapt to, and construct their own, spaces within the prison.27 Summarizing the findings of this research, Sibley and van Hoven observe that the fact

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that such studies call into question the efficacy of prison in producing docile bodies does not mean that space is unimportant: ‘the design of the prison and the ways space is configured and allocated to inmates affects levels of privacy, the desire or need to avoid or associate with others, and relationships between prisoners and officers’.28 Of course, it might be objected in response to this statement that the relationship between prisoners and officers is precisely one of the capillaries through which penal power is exercised and that visibility/invisibility matters when information is being passed to an officer or extra-legal pressure applied. Within the institutional context of the prison, Oleinik noticed that in Russian male colonies watching one another was ‘a natural strategy for everyday life’.29 FSIN’s latter-day conversion to ‘classic panopticism’, evident in the provisions to replace ‘colonies’ by prisons with cellular accommodation in its reform concept to the year 2020, might not be misplaced, as it reasonable to suppose that, if not the determining factor, locking up 100–150 men together overnight under the supervision of one of their own number and ‘his deputies’ has allowed the reproduction of the alternative hierarchies of power in penal colonies. Where women prisoners are concerned this is all by-the-by, since gangs are said not to be a problem in their colonies and, as a consequence, they are likely to be low down the list for a panoptic make-over. For the foreseeable future, therefore, women prisoners will be accommodated in dormitory blocks, and as a consequence incarceration for them will continue to involve the deprivation of privacy to an exceptionally high degree. We conclude this chapter with a consideration of how the women we interviewed attempt to counter this public gaze by creating real and virtual private spaces for themselves. The ‘public/private distinction’ is a binary opposition that attempts ‘to dichotomise the social universe in a comprehensive and sharply demarcated way’.30 Notwithstanding the fact that the boundaries between the private and public are unstable, there is a rough consensus, at least among feminist scholars, that the former is feminine space—the site of the emotionally intense, intimate domain of family and friendship—and the latter is masculine—the site of instrumental and patriarchal relationships. Prisons belong to the masculine, public domain, and lack of privacy is one of the functional prerequisites of incarceration. Research has shown that although some prisoners are able to adapt to lack of privacy, for others it can become the most difficult aspect of their incarceration.31 Interestingly, among our interview groups there was a striking difference between how juvenile and adult women responded to questions about living in mass dormitories. In Novyi Oskol juvenile colony, when asked to score the places in the colony where they felt most comfortable, 95 per cent of a sample of twenty 14–18 yearolds gave the detachment block a score of four or five (the canteen, production zone, administrative block, classrooms scored lower). By contrast, adult women often complained about the lack of privacy in the dormitory block. Noise, constant activity, and violations of personal space have been shown in other jurisdictions to be associated with stress responses and increased likelihood of disorder, violence, and self-harm.32 But equally it has been shown that prisoners can attempt to compensate for their lack of privacy in more positive, less self-destructive ways, which

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demonstrate their agency. The geographer Teresa Dirsuweit has explored how women ‘produce’ private spaces in South African prisons, which as in Russia have communal accommodation, by hanging sheets and curtains around their beds to cut out the public gaze.33 Similarly Sibley and van Hoven show, in the context of a central New Mexico correctional facility in the USA where level-2 prisoners are in dormitory settings, how prisoners construct material and imaginary or virtual private spaces to meliorate the public gaze of their fellow inmates.34 The lack of privacy in Russian penal colonies is exacerbated by the very public nature of the public space that they represent. Whether on the parade-ground, in the workshop or dormitory, prisoners are always in a crowd; they do not have the relative luxury of closing their cell door behind them or periods when they are subject ‘only’ to the gaze of prison officers. The 20 juvenile prisoners in Novyi Oskol named a strange collection of places where they could go to be alone in the colony: the most popular place in winter is the detachment drying room for outside clothes and boots, though the psychologist’s office, the yard bench, ‘behind the church’, and library were also mentioned. Al’pern argues that the denial of even the smallest semblance of privacy in Russia’s correctional colonies bears down particularly on women, because it deprives them of the intimacy of the private.35 Furthermore, the masculine nature of the penal space is made additionally oppressive as a result of the military resonances (parade-ground, detachment, brigade), uniformed ranked officers, and regimentation. The personal and the private is denied by regulations that suppress outward manifestation of ‘the personal’ that might ‘mark’ private space; hanging up sheets and curtains, as in South African women’s prisons, is not an option for Russian prisoners, who are forbidden even to display postcards and pictures of family on bedside cabinets. The only indication of who occupies which bunk is the label at its foot giving the occupant’s name, the article(s) under which she is sentenced, length of sentence, and arrival and release dates. True, in juvenile colonies this might be different: in L’govo, in the dormitories we were shown, soft toys were on display on cabinets, but whether this was put on for our benefit we do not know. Against this, communal displays that ‘domesticate’ the communal space in dormitories are permitted: lace curtains and vases of flowers at the windows.36 There is no privacy to be had in the bathrooms, where both showers and lavatories have no doors. Prisoners and staff we interviewed recognized the problems of ‘compression’ in the public space of the detachment block and described the ways in which this changes women’s behaviour. The future of dormitory accommodation was being actively debated when we undertook our research but the outcome not yet announced, so we had a range of views put to us by personnel. The Head of Corrections at one colony defended the communal life of the detachment on the grounds that it is preparation for release: They [the prisoners] should get used to living in society. We are preparing them for life outside. They cannot live as if they are on a desert island. They will be exposed to people, and they will need to be able to communicate. They must learn to respect those around

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them. They must learn to understand people, and understand relationships. So they have to learn to live in the detachment.

On the other hand, a member of the regional penal administration in another penal zone advocated smaller rooms, though still favouring the collectivist principles of the detachment: They should have smaller rooms; that would make life easier for the women. They have been brought up in different conditions on the outside, each has her own room. Here there are those who are ill, those who don’t wash much or look after themselves, the beds close together means they can’t escape if one coughs, or the other snores. Of course, it’s difficult, taxing.

Our questioning of the women we interviewed left us in no doubt of how oppressive some find dormitory living, although since the only experience most had had of cellular accommodation was in the remand prison or punishment blocks where they are locked up for 23 hours of the day, their interest was largely in how conditions in the dormitory could be improved. Many complained about lack of space and of places where they could be truly alone, and the impossibility of escaping from the pressures of the ‘crowd’. One long-term prisoner explained it thus: In essence I am a sociable person, but to talk with people who I just don’t find interesting— I don’t know, I just don’t want to do it. I usually try to hide behind a book or embroidery . . . I try to escape to somewhere. There are 120 people in the otriad. You can’t even be alone in the toilet! And sometimes you think, God, will there ever be peace? Isn’t there anywhere I can be alone? (Pr 64)

Needless to say, survival in women’s penal colonies requires women to create their own private spaces. In Chapter 10 we discuss how the women prisoners we interviewed sought out and found privacy in the intimacy of friendships and sexual relationships. But they also deployed particular spatial tactics that involved grasping transient and precarious moments of spatial isolation or by finding quiet spaces to which they could retreat in their spare time, after work, and on days off. As in Novyi Oskol, these were the drying room, the library, psychology room, church, and infirmary. Prisoners for whom it all gets too much can hope to convince the colony psychologists to give them time-out in the infirmary or to allow them a few hours in the psychology room. These rooms are equipped with recordings of ‘soothing sounds of waves’ and guitar music and also visual escapes. In IK14 in Mordoviia the psychology room in the rehabilitation centre is decorated with a life-size mural of a path crossing a river leading in the distance to a Russian Orthodox Church. By contrast, in the L’govo juvenile colony the wall is decorated with a single eye, which we were told had been painted by the children. Some colonies also have special purpose dormitories to which prisoners move during their annual leave from penal labour, the ‘vacation room’ (komnata otpusnikov), which affords them a couple of weeks away from the detachment crowd. Finally, prisoners under threat of violence can ask to be moved out of their detachment to a secure cell.

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Since the possibilities for complete isolation are limited, women have to rely on strategies of disengagement to shut off from the outside world and get some privacy—reading, finding a corner away from the crowd. A former prisoner, and brigade leader, recalled the advice she gave to her companions, making a direct link between work as a place for engagement with the reflexive, reflective self: I always said, ‘girls, learn to sew while you can’. Why? Because there’s only one place – at the sewing machine – where you can be alone. And when you know how to sew, no one’s pulling at you, you’re just sitting there, doing your work, and thinking. So . . . the bright ones amongst them, they listened. You see, a person needs to think – how did they end up here? What do they need to change about their life? What can they change and how can they do it? But they need some means of thinking about it. (Ex-Pr 3)

The possibility of dissociating at work was mentioned by another ex-prisoner who was in a different colony: Sometimes you want to go somewhere, so basically, for most people it’s the factory. There you just work, work, work, and somehow you’re distracted from it all. . . . They [pensioners and disabled prisoners who are not required to work in prison] ask me if they can do things, like sweeping up threads in the factory. They want to work. They help in the detachment. They help in the otriad and they come into the factory. Of course, it’s difficult for them without work. They sit in one room, with the television from morning ’til night. It doesn’t allow them to relax mentally. (Pr 45)

For some, however, privacy could only be achieved by gaining control over space. The prisoners who were given leadership roles were in the best position in this respect. The starshaia dneval’naia, or head prefect, for example, has her own room. Her deputies, if pensioners and therefore not required to work, may remain in the detachment block all day and get some solitude (although, as we have seen above, for some this might not be welcome). One 61-year-old serving an 18-year sentence described the dormitory as her favourite place in the colony, as she could be left in peace there during the day when the other women were out at work. Brigade leaders also are able to snatch time alone, for example: ‘I was a work supervisor, so I had the opportunity to go to the smoking room during work hours. Silence—I’m alone. I enjoyed those five minutes’ (Ex-Pr 10). One choice that we might term a ‘strategy of despair’ is when women break internal disciplinary rules on purpose in order to be sent to the punishment isolator for a rest from the crowd. ‘It was all the same to me,’ explained one woman. ‘I was so mentally tired, I was like a sponge full of water. Any nonsense, and they quickly lock you up, and it’s ten days, perfect to have time to relax, just to relax mentally’ (Pr 64). Listening to the views of current and former prisoners seems to indicate that, despite the lack of objectively ‘private’ space in the prison, there is still privacy of a kind to be constructed and created by women through a variety of strategies, all of which require the exercise of individual agency, but in subtly different ways. Some of these strategies recall the realization of gulag victim Irina Tsurkova that

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‘time could take the place of space’; so long as she kept herself busy, she said (in her case cracking jokes at the guards’ expense, singing songs, telling stories), she was able to banish the feelings of being oppressed and enclosed.37 But to what extent these small and sometimes desperate acts of agency can be read as evidence of adaptation and/or protest is an open question. The answer to this question lies with the colony psychologists and ‘educators’, and in the statistics for stress, selfharm, and suicide, to which we, as outside researchers, had no access.

Notes 1. The first is a popular rhyme among prisoners and the second by the poet Igor’ Guberman, Garaki na vse vremena, vol. 1, poem no. 214. 2. Garland, D., ‘A culturalist theory of punishment?’, Punishment & Society, 11/2 (2009), p. 25. 3. Agamben, G., Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto, 1998). 4. See Reddaway, P., Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement.The Annotated Text of the Unofficial Moscow Journal, ‘A Chronicle of Current Events’ (Jonathan Cape: London, 1972). 5. Loss, M., ‘The technologies of total domination’, Surveillance and Society, 2/1 (2004), pp. 15–34; but Pfaff writing on the GDR shows the limits of the surveillance’s disciplinary powers, see Pfaff, S., ‘The limits of coercive surveillance: social and penal control in the GDR’, Punishment & Society, 3 (2001), pp. 381–407. 6. Loss, op. cit., p. 33. 7. Ibid., p. 35. 8. Arendt, H., The Origins of Totalitarianism (Meridian Books: Cleveland and New York, 1958). 9. Jones R., ‘Digital rule. Punishment control and technology’, Punishment & Society, 2/1 (2011), pp. 5–22; Yar, M., ‘Panoptic power and the pathologization of vision: critical reflections on the Foucauldian thesis’, Surveillance and Society, 1/3 (2003), pp. 254–71; Lyon, D. (ed.), Theorizing Surveillance: The Panoptican and Beyond (Willan: Cullompton, 2006). 10. Solzhenitsyn, A., The Gulag Archipelago, vol. II (Collins Harvill: Glasgow, 1976), p. 145. 11. Ginszburg, E., Into the Whirlwind (Harvill Collins: London, 1967), pp. 193–4. 12. Shapovalov, V., Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2001), p. 227. 13. Ibid., p. 233. 14. Ducan, M. G., ‘ “Cradled on the sea”: positive images of prison and theories of punishment’, California Law Review, 76/6 (1988), pp. 1201–47; see also Toker, L., Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indiana, 2000). 15. Antonian, Iu. M. and Kolyshchnitsyna, E. N., Motivatsiia povedeniia osuzhdennykh: monografiia (Unity: Moscow, 2009); Oleinik, A. N., Organized Crime, Prison, and Post-Soviet Societies (Ashgate: Farnham, 2003); Slade, G., Mafia and Anti-mafia in the Republic of Georgia: Criminal Resilience and Adaptation since the Collapse of Communism, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2011; Varese, F., The Russian Mafia. Private Protection in the New Market Economy (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001). 16. Marshall, S., ‘Designing control and controlling for design: towards a prison plan classification for England and Wales?’, in J. R. Gold, and G. Revil (eds), Landscapes of Defence (Prentice Hall: Harlow, 2000), pp. 227–45. 17. Jewkes Y., ‘Penal aesthetics and the architecture of incarceration’, Prison Service Journal, 187 (2010), pp. 23–8; Chelioti, L. (ed.), The Arts of Imprisonment: Essays on Control, Resistance and Empowerment (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2011).

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18. Alford, F., ‘What would it matter if everything Foucault said about prison were wrong? Discipline and Punish after twenty years’, Theory and Society, 229 (2000), pp. 125–46; see also Sibley, D. and van Hoven, B., ‘The contamination of personal space: boundary construction in a prison environment’, Area, 41/2 (2008), pp. 198–206. 19. We rely on the experiences of Igor Sutiagin for our account of internal security; he was held in strict regime colonies, but the basic structure is valid for standard regime also. 20. Kontseptsiia razvitiia ugolovno-ispolnitel’noi sistemy Rossiikoi Federatsii do 2020, utverzhdena rasporiazheniem Praviteltvo Rossiikoi Federatsii ot 14ogo oktobria 2010 g. no. 1772-R. 21. Ministry of Justice, order 259, from 30 December 2005. Polozhenie ob otriade osuzhdennykh ispravitel’nogo uchrezhdeniia. 22. Within colonies prisoners can be on different ‘conditions’ according to their behaviour. Most women are on a standard regime when they arrive at a colony, but can be reduced to severe conditions (strogie usloviia soderzhaniia) or promoted to privileged conditions (oblegchenie usloviia soderzhaniia). The main difference between these conditions relates to the number of visits, parcels, and telephone calls to which the prisoner is entitled. 23. Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), p. 72. 24. http://russiawatchers.ru/daily/legal-reforms, accessed 3 June 2011 [accessed May 2012]. 25. Metodicheskie rekomendatsii po izpol’zovanniiu sistemy ‘sotsial’nykh liftov’ v ispravitel’nykh uchrezhdeniiakh FSIN Rossii v usloviiakh deistvuiushchego zakonodatel’stva (per. MSS, 2011). The idea of social lift is for prisoners to progress through six stages towards release, each stage characterized by particular improved behaviours and rewarded by extra privileges. It was still under discussion in late 2011. 26. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 74. 27. For example, Fidler, M., ‘Four walls and what lies within: the meaning of space and place in prisons’, Prison Service Journal, 187 (2010), pp 3–8. 28. Sibley and van Hoven, op. cit., p. 200. 29. Oleinik, op. cit., p. 55. 30. Weintraub, J. A. and Kumar, K. (eds), Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1997), p. 1. 31. Schwartz, B., ‘Deprivation of privacy as a “functional prerequisite”: the case of the prison’, Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 63/2 (1972), pp. 229–39. 32. Schaeffer, M. A., Baum, A., Paulu, P. B., and Gaes, G. G. (eds), ‘Architecturally mediated effects of social density in prison’, Environment and Behaviour, 20 (1988), pp. 3–20; Sharkey, L., ‘Does overcrowding in prisons exacerbate the risk of suicide among women prisoners?’, Howard Journal, 49/2 (2010), pp. 111–24. 33. Dirsuweit, T., ‘Carceral spaces in South Africa: a case study of institutional power, sexuality and transgression in a women’s prison’, Geoforum, 30 (1999), pp. 71–83. 34. Sibley and van Hoven, op. cit. 35. Al’pern, L., Son i Iav’ Zhenskoi Tiur’my (Aleteiia: St Petersburg, 2004), p. 25. 36. Moran, D., Pallot, J., and Piacentini, L., ‘Lipstick, lace and longing: constructions of femininity inside a Russian prison’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27/4 (2009), pp. 700–20. 37. Shapovalov, op. cit., p. 180.

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PART II Women Prisoners’ Experiences of Carceral Russia

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6 Remand: The First Phase of Coerced Mobilization On 1 January 2010 more than 90 per cent (c.80,000) prisoners and others held in Sizos (remand prisons) were entitled to various dispensations as a result of ill health: 433,700 had socially significant illnesses, of which 72,460 had psychological conditions, 40,770 had active tuberculosis, 55,960 were HIV positive, 62,040 were drug addicts, 26,320, alcoholics. More than 25,000 were classified invalids.1

In Chapter 3 we showed that the sheer scale of Russia’s contemporary penal geography is rooted in a quite profound way in the history of the gulag and its entire world of corrective labour, extreme punishment, and the failure on the part of the state’s legal system to recognize the human rights of prisoners. During the Soviet period the scandalous treatment of prisoners was commonplace and widespread and did not end with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. Across the entire system, from arrest and torture, subversion of the law, clandestine ‘trials’ and transportation, to the brutal hardship of confinement, the human consequences of this penal atrocity are still being felt today. Alongside research conducted by eminent historians and sociologists, the survivors’ testimonies that we have quoted in Part I have shed significant light on how an examination of the Soviet era cannot overlook Russia’s exceptional penal history. This history raises the question about how penal punishment on this scale was managed and exactly how millions of prisoners were moved around a penal estate that stretched across eleven time zones. The same question arises today, albeit in relation to much reduced prisoner numbers. Our focus here is less on the issue of ‘management’ than on how mobility is experienced by women prisoners who, following sentencing, are transported across thousands of miles, often on circuitous routes. Transportation is a secretive process, but we have been able to develop a conceptual understanding of how prisoners engage both with mobility and immobility in the process of being incarcerated. Whilst prison would appear to be a quintessential static institution, the ‘mobilities turn’ in social studies has suggested a broadening of debates to incorporate a consideration of movement into discussions of the spatiality of detention.2 ‘Coerced mobility’ was an everyday feature of Soviet prison life, and we have found that prisoners today are no less subject to this distinctive aspect of penal power than were their predecessors.

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It is a fluid process that is contingent on a set of unusual mobilization strategies occurring in the different confinement settings of remand prison and correctional colony, and during the exceptional travel arrangements of the prison transport. A key starting point for this discussion of how women become prisoners through ‘mobile penal power’ is the early Foucauldian work on closed institutions, such as the mental hospital and the prison, that captured, contained, and controlled prisoners in what is widely viewed as ‘modernist’ modes of social control.3 Spatial control of the banished, transported, quarantined, and contained did not start with the prison. According to Foucault, the power of the quarantine, during Europe’s seventeenth-century plague, gave rise to a specific capillary of power of social control: the separation of the diseased from the healthy through widespread medical and legal power.4 Foucault provides an interesting context for us to think about discipline and its corollary ‘mobility’ in Russian prisons. He offers an understanding of society through a micro-analysis of local power, where legitimacy is fixed in law to create a penal discourse that combines philosophical, moral, legal, and religious considerations that can be dispersed beyond the penal periphery. As Garland has noted, there is ideological mystification in the ways in which punishment has evolved—its aspirations being both normalizing and disciplining—with point prevalence studies of penal practices in Western societies showing that punishment always seeks to be politically productive, culturally contingent, and fluid in its mode and form.5 This can be referred to as a penal continuum marked by a high use of punishment within and beyond the locality of the prison. Where we seek to advance Foucault and where, specifically, we believe we add new insights to existing theoretical analyses is to view a penal continuum as not only that in which punishment has evolved in its location—from the prison to the different modes of regulation in the community—but also as the process of ‘becoming incarcerated’. We would establish this process as the phases and spaces that prisoners inhabit as they are being processed towards confinement. This is an underdeveloped area of Foucauldian theory and sociology of punishment scholarship, which tends to train attention on imprisonment’s effects on the disciplined body and on penal power itself. The passage to prisons in Russia is revealing of how different forms of knowledge come to be transcribed onto the body of the prisoner during motion towards the prison institution. Women prisoners can be described as being subjected to a process of ‘penal phasing’, which involves them in distinctive, and at times amorphous, forms of spatial detention and regulation coinciding with their movement through the disciplining process and towards penal confinement. The phases we discuss are the social control mechanisms of remand, transportation to the colony, and quarantine. We cannot know whether ‘coerced mobility’ is part of a conscious strategy to intensify punishment’s pains in Russia as it relates to women prisoners, but our findings certainly underscore the need to consider its consequences. In the next two chapters we discuss this ‘penal phasing’ and argue that each control phase relies on movement and mobility that we characterize as ‘coerced

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mobilization’, where prisoners are differentiated from each other through having greater or lesser degrees of agency over where and how they move. The phases are not site-specific, but are rather fluid and contingent on the developing and enveloping penal power that escalates in the journey to the final prison destination. We begin our discussion in this chapter with the initial phase of penal confinement which is in the cells of the IVS (izoliator vremennogo soderzhanniia) and Sizo (sledstvennyi izoliator)—respectively the temporary detention facility and remand prison.

Mesta ne stol’ otdalennyi (Places not so very far away)6 Experiences of remand vary, but in most Western countries it is the fastest growing sector of prison populations. In many other countries, the worst overcrowding can be found in remand prisons where prisoners often languish in poor conditions to await sentence or transfer to a prison establishment after sentencing. Their experience is often one of loss, disorientation, and uncertainty. The emotions and attitudes that are associated with psychological distress feature strongly among the experiences of women prisoners who are on remand. Research in other jurisdictions has shown that the initial process of arrest and remand is associated with disruption of the family so that ‘they felt disoriented, and their energies were mostly focused on locating their partners and establishing contact’.7 A woman prisoner’s capacity to cope is often dictated by her ability to maintain contact with her children throughout the remand process and to keep psychologically and physically well. As an exceptional penal space, prison remand is where the sentenced and those awaiting sentence meet and mesh. Prison remand could even be described as the most reckless and unstable aspect of confinement. It is a ‘risk moment’ because of lack of support and the heavy burdens that loom for those awaiting trial and sentence.8 Women prisoners experience a particular vulnerability because of specific personal deprivations, such as histories of abuse, relationship breakdown (where violence often features), and the stress factors themselves that are common to periods of detention.9 Russian women prisoners’ experiences of remand share many of the characteristics of prisoners on remand everywhere, but within a unique mobility system. In Russia, remand prisoners are kept on the move between cells; there are quarantine cells for when prisoners first arrive, remand cells, cells for prisoners who have been sentenced but are waiting for the outcome of an appeal, holding cells for prisoners pending transportation, and the notorious ‘press cells’ where prisoners are taken ‘to be worked on’ to make confessions. Our respondents had either experienced or heard stories about violence in remand prisons. These stories may be apocryphal but they tell us that in Russia, as in other jurisdictions, there is an extreme capacity for violence, corruption, and bullying. Violence aside, it is important here to draw attention to the major differences in the experience of remand between Western and Russian prisons—in the time spent on remand,

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conditions in remand prisons, visitation, and the process of release from remand to custody. Russian remand prisons, or Sizos, are generally located in urban centres. Apart from prisoners at various stages of the process between arrest and awaiting transportation, every Sizo has a contingent of convicted prisoners who are in the relatively privileged position of having secured a domestic job in the prison for the period of their sentence and who are housed separately from the other prisoners. There are 226 pre-trial detention centres in Russia and a further 164 facilities functioning as remand prisons in correctional colonies, the PFRSI (Pomeshcheniia funktsioniruiushchie v rezhime sledsvennykh izoliatorov). There are also 2,467 criminal-executive inspectorates responsible for the management of noncustodial sanctions.10 The majority of women held on remand are in mixed facilities with men, where they occupy a separate block or floor. These are the same prisons that in the 1990s were described as being in a critical state with very poor living conditions, extreme overcrowding and squalor, violence, and the rapid spread of air-borne diseases.11 There are a small number of remand prisons exclusively for women, including the purpose-built facility in Moscow known among prisoners as ‘the Bastille’. It was opened in 1996 with a capacity for 1,300. The building is in the form of a square surrounding a central courtyard with no windows in the outer walls. In the courtyard are a series of enclosed, wire-netted exercise yards, laid out in a circle. On one side of the square is a three-storey building which houses eight ‘general cells’ (the obshchaki), each for 44 women, and a suite of smaller cells. Women whose cases are being investigated are held on the first and second floors, whilst women awaiting transportation are in cells on the ground floor. Partially underground, there are further cells for women waiting to be taken to court or waiting, post-trial, to be allocated to a new cell, and quarantine cells where new arrivals are subjected to medical examination.12 Two other sides of the square are devoted to so-called ‘special’ and ‘semi-special cells’, for four and eight women respectively, hospital cells and the ‘medical laboratory’, and the housekeeping department, which includes cells for the convicted women of the Sizo labour force. The final side of the square is occupied by administrative offices and further service facilities. ‘The Bastille’ also has a small church for worship, two cells for women with babies, and visiting rooms.13 According to the prison psychiatrist, 15 out of every 20 women arriving in the Moscow Sizo are 18–25 years of age and drugaddicted. The prison has a special cell for 35 HIV-infected prisoners.14 The Moscow women’s Sizo is exceptional. Women outside the capital are held in old remand prisons that are in need of repair and maintenance. The Sizo in Pskov, for example, was built in 1805; it is a men’s facility but with seven cells with threestorey bunks for a total of 60–80 women.15 The remand prison, therefore, can be a complex architectural structure with a clear division of labour between its various parts. Although there is not the mass movement of prisoners over a large territory that characterizes correctional colonies, nevertheless the arrangement described above lends itself to the circulation of prisoners into and out of the

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facility and between cells. This, in turn, implies a high level of social circulation and mixing. In women’s talk about their experience of remand that we present in this chapter, we have to note two features of the interviews we took. First, we did not include in our interview groups any women who were currently held on remand or, indeed, who had been held and then acquitted and released. Secondly, the women we interviewed described remand from the standpoint of their later sentence in a colony. Our materials about remand, therefore, are all retrospective— they are the recollections of their time on remand of women currently serving sentences or of former prisoners. We found that the women’s current situation clearly influenced the stories they narrated about remand. Women still in a correctional colony described the experience as negative but shied away from giving details; whereas former prisoners filled in detail, describing a remand system that was corrupt and where bullying and abuse are commonplace. This difference, no doubt, is because the ex-prisoners felt freer to speak out than did the current prisoners, but it also reflects the fact that they had had an opportunity to discuss their experiences with a range of interested parties and may have internalized media portrayals of the Sizo, which are unremittingly negative. But from both groups expressions like uzhasno and strashno—‘terrible’ and ‘awful’—were common, and many spoke of the shock of their first encounter with ‘endless dark corridors’, bars on the windows, and slamming cell doors.

From the temporary to ‘semi-permanent’ isolator The first impressions of detention for the majority of Russian women prisoners are not, in fact, formed in the Sizo but in the IVS or temporary isolator, usually located in the police station and equivalent to police custody suites in the UK. These cells are not in the FSIN system, but are under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The temporary cells are for people who are deemed necessary to detain whilst the paperwork is being prepared for their transfer to the remand prison for investigation of their case.16 Prisoners can also be taken back to temporary isolators during the period of their trial or during the investigatory process. Conditions in these facilities were universally described as dreadful by our interview partners and, as a first taste of the life ahead, a frightening portent. One former prisoner described to us the cell in which she was held: [I]t was about three by four [metres]. And you’re kept there for 24 hours, never leaving it. It only had cold water – at night you had to boil one kettle for everyone. In all there were three beds and that was it, nothing else. And a little window up above, that you couldn’t even crawl through. (Ex-Pr 1)

Another described being held in the IVS in just her jeans and a blouse, being fed nothing but porridge, and of being given no warning when she was transferred to the Sizo. The description she gave of the IVS cell was of ‘a terrible place, like a

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basement, with wooden bunks, gloomy, dirty and damp’ (Pr 59). She complained that although her parents repeatedly came to the police station to find out where she was, they were not told for four days that she had been transferred to the Sizo. And yet another former prisoner, who was held in the IVS in a small town for a whole week before being transferred to the Sizo in the regional capital, described the accommodation as very poor, consisting of a metal bunk bed and mattress, but no bed linen. Her mother was told of her whereabouts and so was able to prepare some warm clothes for her daughter to take with her to the Sizo. But despite contact with her mother, this prisoner reacted badly to incarceration ‘closing in’ on herself: I didn’t eat anything for five days, maybe six, generally I didn’t eat. I so retreated into myself that they called a doctor to talk to me, and the head of the IVS summoned me and talked to me also about not eating and not talking to anyone, and asked if I wanted to see anyone. Generally this was bad . . . I suffered a lot. (Pr 64)

The experience in the temporary cells shaped women’s expectations of what was to come. Many talked of the fear of what lay ahead of them, for example: ‘When I arrived in the IVS it was so filthy, really proper dirt and grime, because they lock up every sort there—complete dossers and scruffs, really they can pick up anyone. And when I first found myself there I thought Good Lord, if it’s like this here, what’s it going to be like there? (Ex-Pr 18)

What awaits the majority of prisoners in the Sizo is a long period of confinement and uncertainty about when it will end. According to the criminal procedure code, investigations are supposed to be completed within two months of a prisoner being charged, but this can be extended up to twelve months, and ‘in exceptional circumstances’ beyond this. Once the investigation is completed, the prisoner has a period, normally about a month, to prepare her defence, after which the case comes to court. Table 6.1 shows the length of time for these stages to be completed according to the 2009 census of prisoners. Among our interview groups, pre-sentence detention pending trial lasted from two or three to eighteen months, but for those who had decided not to go down the plea-bargaining route, their stay in the Sizo was further extended by a decision to appeal. Prisoners who submit an appeal or complaint await the resolution of their procedure in the Sizo. This can add further weeks or months to their time there.17 Remand is a period of waiting and not knowing when it will end. But when it does come, the end can be very abrupt and without warning: The day before I was sent . . . to the colony, they brought me a piece of paper addressed to my parents, which I had to sign, to say that right now I’m here in the Sizo and that tomorrow I’ll be sent [to the colony]. When my mother received the letter, she didn’t have time to bring me any food or winter clothes . . . When I arrived, my mum wrote me that as soon as they [had] received the letter, my father collected stuff together, food, and set off for the prison, but when he arrived in the evening . . . I wasn’t there any more. (Ex-Pr 4)

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Table 6.1. The length of time taken to bring the cases of women on remand to court, according to the 2009 FSIN census of prisoners Time in months taken to complete each stage

Stages (in percentage of population at each stage at time of census) 1. Investigation

Not completed at time of census Under 1 1–2 2–6 6–12 More than 12 Total

2. Preparation of defence

40.6

n/a

{38.6

85.5 9.1 4.3 0.9 0.2 100.0

16.5 3.3 1.1 100.0

3. Trial n/a 76.6 11.7 9.7 1.7 0.3 100.0

Source: Geranin, V. V., Podozrevaemye i obviniaemye, soderzhashchikhsia v sledvennykh izoliatorakh. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009 (Prisoners under investigation and charged in remand prisons. From the materials of a special census of prisoners taken on 12–18 November 2009) (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), pp. 67–8, 71.

In addition to lodging an appeal, the convicted prisoners we interviewed also occasionally made requests about where they would serve their sentences, as they are entitled to do under the procedural code. They can, for example, ask to serve their sentence in a colony near to home for compassionate reasons, although few of our interview partners knew of this right or attempted to exercise it. One woman did describe how prisoners in her Sizo all wanted to avoid being sent to the colony in another region ‘V’, which was a long way away and to which the woman from that Sizo usually were sent: The thing is, people really want to stay in their own region, and virtually everyone who knew they were going to V tried to wriggle out of it. I didn’t try, but those who tried didn’t get anywhere – they still ended up in V. For me, no, I didn’t try, because, right, a colony’s a colony. They’re all basically the same. In the end, they’re all awful. (Pr 57)

For most of the women prisoners in our study, the IVS and the remand prison were the most closely connected of the institutions in which they are held to their home. Once prisoners embark on the prisoner transport, all contact with family can be severed and the emotional impact of this can be intense. It could be that the quality of life in the Russian Sizo is improved, if only marginally, through the positive psychological effects of the proximity of family. There are no statistics or published research documenting the mental and emotional well-being of women prisoners on remand in Russia. In our own study, we did seek to explore the psychological and emotional well-being of our respondents through a series of questions and discussions with them around settling into the colony, contact with home, and adaptation. Although for most respondents it was a bad experience, for others proximity to home was a positive aspect of the Sizo, despite the poor living conditions. Thus, according to one respondent, ‘In [the remand] prison my morale was better. [My] native city, native walls, were a plus’ (Pr 57). The fact of being in a familiar town evidently can help women to feel ‘in place’. We develop this argument in Chapter 8.

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The entitlement to visits in Sizos, as laid down by federal law, is for up to two visits per month for up to three hours. The granting of visits rests with different organs depending upon the stage of the legal process; so it could be the investigator, the procurator, judge, or Sizo boss who decides. Visits are permitted with both family and friends, and there is also an unlimited right of correspondence with relatives (all subject to censorship). In reality, the number who receive visits is low. According to the 2009 FSIN census, 70.1 per cent of women held in Sizos received no visit at all in 2009, 13.4 per cent just one visit, and 16.5 per cent two or more visits.18 The women we interviewed who did have visits said that they derived both comfort and material support from them (usually in the form of food, cigarettes, and sanitary products). Maintaining contact with children was especially important.19 For some women, however, the knowledge that a child was near but for most of the time out of reach was a source of pain: I couldn’t think about my baby; when I started to think about my son that was it, I had this feeling, my eyes would fill up. I’d think he’s not far away and I’d nearly go mad. Twice I cut myself on the machinery [in the sewing-workshop], because of it. (Ex-Pr 13)

Later, in Chapter 8, we will see that the limited number and episodic nature of visits women can receive in colonies (both because of restrictions in the criminal correctional code and the friction of distance that prevents relatives making the journey) can result in their avoiding visits because they are not practised at saying goodbye. Following the adoption of European human rights norms and international law into domestic legislation in the early 1990s, humane conditions, prisoners’ rights, prosecutorial transparency, and independent due process in Russian criminal justice have come to feature most strongly in the exposure, discussion, and reform of the penal system. For human rights lawyers, the right to a fair trial is not something that can be taken for granted in any jurisdiction. However, in Russia, time and again the scrutiny of the penal system often comes down to procedural fairness and the rule of law in sentencing. The length of prison sentences in Russia has long attracted worldwide condemnation, but the length of time prisoners are held in remand prisons is also a concern. Downes’s pioneering comparison of the Netherlands and England and Wales in 1993 introduces the concept of the depth of imprisonment: meaning the extent to which the damaging psychological experience of imprisonment is expressed, ‘through relations with staff; relations with prisoners; rights and privileges; material standards and conditions; and a sense of the overall quality of life which the prison regime made possible or withheld’.20 The notion of depth certainly captures the effects of being subject to controls and ensures that judicial rights correspond with the status of the prisoner and the stage she is at in the criminal justice process. This is a particular issue for prisoners on remand, as there is a sense that, in terms of depth, they are sitting at the shallow end of imprisonment. Here we concur with King and McDermott, who argue that the imagery of depth does not capture the weight of imprisonment, which varies according to the category of the offender, the sentence, and where the sentence

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will be served.21 A prisoner on remand becomes conscious of depth and weight as soon as she is arrested as she struggles with the questions, ‘will I be convicted?’, ‘where will I be sentenced?’, ‘what will the sentence be?’, ‘what is it like there?’, ‘will I see my family?’ And this lists just a small handful of prescient questions that every prisoner seeks to answer when the prospect of imprisonment to a penal colony becomes a reality. For Russian women prisoners we would also add: ‘just how far away will they send me?’ and ‘how will my family find me?’ Brookman and Pierpoint argue that the exercise of scope and discretion in sentencing judgements can lead to inappropriate and improper use of custody.22 This is particularly the case for women prisoners across the UK, who find themselves facing imprisonment for multiple, stacked minor offences. Remand is also used excessively in Russia, but often essential legal advice, a particularly necessary addition to the process, is deficient. It is difficult to verify the extent to which compliance to both domestic and European law is maintained by the Russian authorities, and research is needed into the uptake of legal advice. Among our interview partners, there seemed to be a low level of understanding of their legal rights. Prison sociological research demonstrates that imprisonment does considerable harm to prisoners in very obvious, and also in much concealed, ways.23 Moreover, obstacles for successful and safe re-entry into society can surface at the very moment when a prisoner begins her sentence and arrives into custody. While harm is indeed unintended, it is nonetheless the prevailing feature of prisons today that everywhere they accommodate the hurting and the harmed. For prisoners, any experience of imprisonment is a matter of survival. Within the prison, safety, security, autonomy, and maintaining good physical and mental health hang on one side of the fragile balance of maintaining sound relationships between captives and custodians. In the following section, we outline the complex and arbitrary nature of some of the experiences of building social contact between prisoners, and between prisoners and staff during the first phase of penal confinement in the Sizo.

Power and corruption in the Sizo cell With very few exceptions, women prisoners interviewed gave a negative impression of conditions in the Sizo, describing poor living conditions, overcrowding, and fear. The Sizo became the standard against which they compared their subsequent experience of communal living in the dormitories of the correctional colonies, casting the latter in a more favourable light. It was striking in a focus group we held with juvenile offenders in the L’govo educational colony just how adamantly and vocally the girls rejected the idea of replacing dormitories by cells.24 We noted in Chapter 5 that adult women who struggle to secure privacy in the dormitories of colonies nevertheless were prepared to tolerate communal living and did not put forward arguments for alternatively structured accommodation. The clue may lie with personnel’s favoured explanation—that there is a cultural and/or gender-specific disposition towards communal living—but equally possible, and

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in our view more likely, is that the women’s preferences are shaped by prior experiences in the Sizo. Russian law stipulates that conditions must meet national and European standards in terms of space and access to healthcare, but monitoring compliance is difficult because of the large numbers of people passing through Sizos and the backwards and forwards movement to the courts. Legislative and public procedures for oversight are weak. In 2006 Russian television showed a 50-part serial called Zona, which depicted life in a remand prison in a small provincial town in Russia.25 The serial represented the remand prison as a place of corruption, collusion between prison officers and the procuracy, violence, gang law, and deprivation. The serial stimulated public debate about conditions in Russian prisons and demands for reform. Improving conditions in Sizos has, in fact, been the priority of the Federal Penal Service in the last two decades (and lies behind the series of amnesties designed to reduce overcrowding in the late 1990s and early 2000); but, despite improvements, it is clear from our interviews that conditions of remand detention in Russia are still riddled with problems and remain grim in many areas. Meanwhile, the attention in penal reform has passed from remand to the conditions under which prisoners serve their sentences.26 Our interview partners commented on the lack of space and privacy in the overcrowded conditions of shared cells in the Sizo. Here is a former prisoner’s candid account of conditions in early 2000: It varies – there are cells for 30, but also for 6, 10, 18. Basically, I was in a big cell, where there were 28-30 people. It was very stuffy, and in summer it was full of bedbugs. I was on the third floor, next to the sewing room, and the mattresses they gave us were infected with bedbugs that ran over us. So I slept on the floor under a lamp, which was always kept lit at the door, because otherwise I would have been eaten alive. They [the bedbugs] didn’t let us sleep at all. But they wouldn’t come out if the light was on – they only crawl around in the dark . . . We had all kinds of sickness there, and the girls had skin complaints. I myself had psoriasis. It’s very hard in this cell anyway, because you can’t wash. Once every 10 days you got to shower; and in the cell, with 30 people in it, the temperature was something like 30 degrees. You can’t wash properly. (Ex-Pr 1)

This prisoner reported that she was told that previously conditions had been even worse and more overcrowded. Food has evidently become more abundant and better compared with the 1990s, but even so some prisoners said they suffered severe weight loss whilst on remand, and complained about the vitamin deficiency in prison food and the lack of fresh air and daylight. Prisoners on remand wear their civilian clothes, as a marker of their presumed innocence, but this can cause problems for those who do not have friends or family to bring in clothes that are suitable for prison; and, as we learned earlier, it can take a long time for people on the outside to find out the whereabouts of their friend or relative who has been arrested. But it is not just a matter of clothes: prisoners rely on contacts on the outside for hygiene products, and also for supplementary food. There was universal

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condemnation among the women interviewed of the arrangements for washing and bathing, as the following extract illustrates: INTERVIEWEE: In the prison [Sizo], on the first day there was a bath. Yes, and then they brought you to the cell. There, of course, you undressed, washed, blah, blah, blah. Nothing more . . . INTERVIEWER: But the toilet, that must have been in the cell? INTERVIEWEE: In the cell, yes, of course that’s where the toilet was. It had a drape in front of it, a draped sheet, that’s all. So, well, no one went to the toilet when we were sitting at the table. It’s just being civil to each other. So, we’d burn paper when someone went to the toilet, because, well, you see, the cell was small. INTERVIEWER: So that there wouldn’t be a smell? INTERVIEWEE: Yes, so there wouldn’t be a smell. Sure, you’d sit and you’d burn something there. INTERVIEWER: What did you burn? INTERVIEWEE: Well, in the prison you couldn’t have a lighter. Here in the zona [colony] you used to be able to have them, but now they’re banned. Matches. We’d light matches. (Ex-Pr 12)

Memories of their first entry into the cell in the Sizo or IVS were still vivid for some women years later. Speaking about her first time in the Sizo, one woman serving a second sentence described the experience: ‘I was 17 years old. I went into the cell and, yes, it was frightening. Twelve people, all young, but all the same it was scary. It’s frightening just to cross the threshold of a prison’ (Pr 64). The first few days in the cell are, in fact, critical for new arrivals as they position themselves in relation to the women already there. As in correctional colonies, there is an informal hierarchy in the cells of remand prisons. One woman, usually someone who has been there for a long time, is designated starshaia po kamere or ‘cell prefect’, whilst other women are chosen to be dezhurnaia or ‘cell monitor’, responsible for keeping the cell clean. This latter job normally falls to the weakest woman. As in the colonies, this system, for all personnel’s protestations to the contrary, can be corrupted. According to some of the ex-prisoners we interviewed, the Operations Department, which in Sizos is tasked with assisting the investigation process, can recruit cell prefects to help to secure confessions. We learned that when a new prisoner arrives in the Sizo, she can be presented with a piece of paper by the prefect on which she is supposed to write a confession; failure to do this can result in her getting no cigarettes and, more seriously, can sacrifice the prefect’s protection. It is important to note here that a large proportion of women on remand are drug addicts, which makes them vulnerable to such pressure. In order to stay safe, a newcomer in the Sizo will phone her parents to bring in narcotics, which the prisoner hands over to the prefect: So, in order not to offend anyone and to be left alone, these girls phone their parents and ask for them [narcotics]. So they buy two to three thousand rubles’ worth to have it

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delivered to the prison. That’s how it works. That is if the parents are more or less well off. I can’t talk about it without getting angry. Then the operations officer is paid to pass them on to the cell – they don’t stop this trade because the prefects are doing their work for them. So the newcomers write what’s needed, because they cannot hold out against the pressure. (Ex-Pr 3)

If a woman does not succumb to the ‘gentle’ pressure in the regular cell, she might find herself moved to a so-called ‘press hut’ (press-khat). The press hut gets its name from the English loan-verb ‘pressovat’, to press or compress, but officially they do not of course exist. The name describes small eight-person cells that are occupied permanently by a number of long-term prisoners, called in prison slang the mnogokhody (or ‘regulars’), who have been recruited by the operations department to pressurize non-compliers who are put in with them. As in correctional colonies, women in Sizos might themselves become the subject of attempted recruitment by the operations department. One respondent, a former prisoner, described the psychological pressure from the operativnik whose attempt to recruit her, she told us, she rejected: He got so angry with me that I didn’t want even to speak to him. He abused me psychologically, I don’t know . . . morally he made me feel worthless, he would move me from cell to cell with all my things, my bags, every day, even once twice a day he moved me. (Ex-Pr 11)

For the month during which he was tormenting her, she was very unhappy, lost weight, and was suspected of informing by the other women who ‘bristled up’ against her. She found the suspicions of her co-prisoners to be the most upsetting aspect of the situation. More generally, prisoners reported mobility within the remand system, usually because they become, or are assumed to be, informers. Movement and mobility can disrupt the repetitive routines of confinement, but the basis of this movement can be grounded in exploiting prisoners to confess to crimes or to work for the regime. We were unable to verify the accuracy of such accusations of authority-sanctioned bullying in Sizo cells, but they came to us from sufficiently varied and unconnected sources to indicate that they describe an aspect of the reality of life in some Sizos. Importantly, though, regardless of their accuracy, these stories form part of the imaginary of women prisoners, shaping how they represent different aspects of their experience of punishment. In this context, it is important to note the language women use to speak about the Sizo, calling it ‘prison’, tiur’ma. In official penal nomenclature, tiur’ma refers very specifically to the small number of facilities for convicted male prisoners found guilty of particularly serious offences, recidivists or perpetual rule breakers. In the mental imaginary of prisoners, prison is thus associated with harsh regimes, long hours being locked in cells, and a presumption of guilt. The use of the name ‘prison’ in women’s talk about Sizos is, therefore, important for showing the lack of differentiation that our women respondents made between ‘going to prison’ and ‘being on remand’. In Russia, a woman’s identity as ‘prisoner’ is assumed once she enters a pre-existing penal space.

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Personnel were careful to make the distinction between prisoners (zakliuchennie) and convicts (osuzhdennie), when talking with us, but in colonies and remand prisons alike everyone under guard was referred to in everyday speech as zeks or the kontingent (contingent), both of which have come straight down from the time of the gulag. On a more abstract level, a woman’s identity as prisoner is further preformed on the ongoing journey towards incarceration when she engages in the prison transportation, etap, which we discuss in Chapter 7. For now, it is worth noting that these ways of speaking about incarceration, including using stereotypes from the Soviet past such as lager’ (camp) and the Stolypin (convict carriages), have some importance for confirming a woman’s identity as convict, through the criminalization process that began with her arrest, continued through the time and spaces occupied in the IVS and Sizo, and consolidated in the prison transport. The Sizo experience is a brutal and cruel introduction to Russian penal institutions which, women told us, gave them an essential first lesson in survival that they took with them to the colonies. Even if, personally, the experience in the Sizo might not be too bad, the mythology surrounding it can mean that women understand it as a training ground for what is to come later. While personnel attribute the relative calm of women’s correctional colonies to good governance, our respondents attribute it to the women having been already broken by the time they arrive in the colonies. The Sizo breaks women’s backs and locks them into a ‘vicious circle’ of victimhood. As one, angry former prisoner explained: You see they are already victims, broken and therefore compliant with the regime they find there. This contemptible system means that the person who is humiliated just wants to escape, for it all to stop. She comes, shall we say, like fresh meat; those who have been through it once know what’s going on and they hate it but do nothing, they do nothing. Why? Because it’s a vicious circle, you understand? That is, when she arrives in the colony she’s already done for. Her personality is already broken, she’s lost her reason. (Ex-Pr 11)

It is instructive to point out that discontent and abuses of power are commonplace in prisons everywhere. Prisoners cannot escape the fact that they enter a new form of oblivion when sent to custody where legal rules sit alongside illegal rules and norms.27 Official rules can offend and are often resisted, yet as a practical matter, we wish to emphasize here, it is the deep cavities in the remand process that are open to common systematic abuse and are reported most often by human rights monitors. Human rights monitoring and minimum standards protection in legal processes need to be safe-guarded and defended in remand, because without them, the disciplined mobilization that follows Sizo will create a panoply of extra punitive processes.

Social relationships in the Sizo cell The Sizo sets up the framework that prisoners will need to manage relationships in the colony. It also provides a preliminary course in prison jargon and the official

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and unofficial ‘laws’ that will govern their behaviour. In these ‘preparatory courses’ for their future life, how to read and conduct relationships with fellow prisoners is of vital importance. While for the majority of women the Sizo creates situations in which they are constantly reminded of their loss of power and agency, our respondents also indicated that it provided opportunities to forge new positive relationships. Not all accounts we were given of the Sizo were negative, therefore. One former prisoner describes her arrival in the Sizo cell: I went in . . . from the TV you’d expect any minute to be beaten up, knifed – well, I went in with my mattress, with fearful eyes, and I see young girls, younger than me, and it’s ‘what are you in for?’ ‘Oh ho, one of us’. They accepted me and explained everything, how to behave; everything was OK. I hadn’t been able to bring my toothpaste or a towel and they all lent me these things. One had a spare towel, another even some spare knickers, another soap, a toothbrush. We drank tea together. (Ex-Pr 13)

Another described the relationships between women in her cell as unthreatening and insisted that everyone tried their best to keep the atmosphere calm: Anything could happen, but we tried to reach a consensus on things, and somehow we’d find a way out of any situation. We tried to live like a big family. There’s a lot you don’t see, about how people change, as they move from cell to cell, and you keep good memories of them. People would go to another cell, and I wouldn’t see them again. (Pr 23)

Inevitably, the atmosphere in a cell depends upon the character of the women occupying it. According to prison personnel, the detachment in the correctional colony is ‘one large family’, but the evidence we collected indicates that it is, in fact, in the unpromising conditions of the Sizo that women most often reported the development of a group identity. This may be a function of size and shared recent experience of adversity. Many former and current prisoners spoke of how they looked to other women sharing their cell for information about what would happen to them next and what different destination colonies held for them. Colonies tend to have relatively fixed catchments which draw prisoners from particular Sizos, and women who had been through the system before were generally cognizant of these. Nevertheless, uncertainty normally surrounds the question of final destinations. Taking in all the rules while living in a perpetual state of limbo, which is part of the initial phase of penal punishment in Russia, produces the need both to understand what seems like an amorphous waiting game, while navigating new and, at times, dangerous interactions they might encounter in the cell. We were surprised at how often descriptions of new relationships with men surfaced in the narratives of women about the period in the Sizo, but understood that mixed remand facilities provided a final opportunity for women to have relationships on equal terms with the opposite sex; as distinct from the unequal interactions, including sexual, they have once in the colony with a range of male authority figures. Some of the women’s stories were touching and told of their attempt to recapture and retain part of that life on the outside.

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Well, to cut a long story short, we got to know each other there in prison. As it turned out I was in a cell and opposite we could see into a men’s cell and so, well . . . we didn’t have to do anything. We would just chat with each other – we’d sit at the window at night; we talked, got to know one another . . . Then I got a letter via the ‘post’ and I learnt that there was a guy who wanted to get to know me, and so on, and I sort of wrote a reply . . . (Ex-Pr 11)

The ‘post’ referred to is the practice of passing letters between cells by means of a cord strung between cell windows that, evidently, also operates in the Stolypin carriages of the prison transport. The woman we quote above explained the importance of the friendship she developed with her admirer; this was conducted through a hole in the floor of the cell which the women were able to enlarge (some remand prisons are in old and poorly repaired buildings, so to make a hole in the floor is not as unlikely as it might sound in other jurisdictions) sufficiently for the prisoners to hold hands: I thought to myself, do I really need this; at first I even was afraid to go there [to the hole in the floor]. But anyway we got to know one another, and he sort of helped me; as a matter of fact I cri . . . [hesitation] it’s not the done thing there to cry, or to show your tears. After a day in court you come back and, well, you cover your eyes; he came to talk as my tears started and my tears fell on him. He’s the only man I’ve ever cried in front of. Well, those men they cheered us up and detracted us from our dark thoughts. Well, it helped. (Ex-Pr 11)

She continued to explain how the interactions through the hole became important for women in the cell: Well, they were important, that is getting to know them, for forgetting, and they’d try to do something nice for you. If it hadn’t been for that little hole, you can’t imagine what the six months would be like; sit, think, read. But they’d think up things to do; they’ll say, ‘hey girls, do you need some shampoo?’ We were their little princesses. And they gave – such great shampoo . . . or postcards with things attached, we sent postcards to each other. One couple even fell in love and when they were freed got married and they still live together now… (Ex-Pr 11)

Prisoners steadily lose capacities to maintain power and agency during confinement, hence they would grasp opportunities that made them ‘feel good’ and less trapped. But not all relationships between the prisoners in the Sizo are harmonious. In the words of this same prisoner, ‘as a matter of fact, there are very rotten people in the Sizo, simply rotten, who won’t let the others live’ (Ex-Pr 11). We have argued that on remand women for the first time learn what to expect of incarceration in Russia’s penal institutions, although the experiences differ in important ways from what is to come later. In the IVS and Sizo women generally do not work, whereas they do in the correctional colonies; they have minimal exercise, engage in very little ‘re-education’ and live in smaller groups. The fixed and static nature of their confinement (even though they circulate through different functional cells) is remarkably different from what lies ahead.

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Conclusion There is currently very little academic research that focuses exclusively on remand prisons in Russia or that distinguishes between pre-trial, pre-sentence, and postsentence prisoners. While human rights reports praise Russian authorities for positive engagement with the reform process, our evidence indicates that much more needs to be done if the penal system is not to face continued criticism over its failure to improve conditions and practices in the remand sector. Penal reform groups have repeatedly drawn to the attention of the authorities the areas in which the treatment of remand prisoners still falls short of international norms, as well as the treatment of juveniles and political prisoners who have been subject to ‘arbitrary detention’.28 Penal law in the European sphere has become harmonized through partial approximation of laws.29 As the penal law of the European Union has been developing, there have been limitations on its expansion due to budgetary restrictions and also political obstacles arising from inclusion of new member states whose penal systems have not met human rights and judicial standards. Russia is not a member of the European Union, but as a member of the Council of Europe since 1996 its penal law has increasingly come to mirror European Prison Rules (2008). Real legislative work is ongoing and many adjustments have been made to the penal laws that govern Russia; but with regard to remand, Russia is expected to comply with standards that reduce arbitrary detention and ensure access to legal aid. Prisoners are entitled to see their lawyers to lodge appeals against convictions, but as our interviews indicated, very few appeals against conviction get very far. Our research shows that a ‘penal phasing’ logic exists in Russia that compels women to wait in a distinctive range of penal spaces before propelling her through an elaborate and complex transportation system to territories that are remote and out of the reach of families. At each of the ‘stations’ at which she has to wait, the prisoner gets ever closer to her final destination, often not knowing for certain when she will arrive and where this will be. In the following chapter we outline the second phase of coercive mobilization, as women enter the liminal space of the prison transport.

Notes 1. Kontseptsiia razvitiia ugolov’no-ispolnitel’noi sistemy Rossiiskoi Federatsii do 2020, utverzhdena rasporiazheniem Pravitel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 14ogo oktabria 2010 g. no. 1772-R (The conception for the development of the Russian correctional system to 2020) (2010), pp. 3–4. 2. On the mobilities ‘turn’ see Sheller, M. and Urry, J., ‘The new mobilities paradigm’, Environment and Planning, A 38 (2006), pp. 207–26. 3. Garland, D., The Culture of Control, Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001); Simon, J., ‘The rise of the carceral state’, Social Research: An International Quarterly, 74/2 (2007), pp. 471–508. 4. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Penguin/Peregrin Books: London, 1979), p. 198.

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5. Garland, D. and Sparks, R., ‘Criminology, social theory and the challenge of our times’, British Journal of Criminology, 40/2 (2000), pp. 189–204. 6. The phrase ‘a place not so far away’ originated in the 1822 Siberian Committee that defined places of exile as those that were ‘far away’ and those that were ‘not so far’—Perm’, Olonets, and Orenburg—and was used to also describe gulag camps. 7. Codd, H., In the Shadow of Prison (Willan: Cullompton, 2008), p. 52. 8. Snaken, S., ‘Forms of violence and regimes in prison: report of research in Belgian prisons’, in A. Liebling and S. Maruna (eds), The Effects of Imprisonment (Willan: Cullompton, 2005), p. 328; Liebling, A., Suicides in Prison (Routledge: London, 1992). 9. Carlen, P. and Worrell, A., Analysing Women’s Imprisonment (Willan: Cullompton, 2004); Corston Report (Home Office: London, 2007). 10. These numbers are taken from Kontseptsiia, op. cit., and relate to 1 January 2010. 11. Piacentini, L. and King, R., ‘The correctional system during transition’, in A. Pridemore (ed.), Ruling Russia: Crime, Law, and Justice in a Changing Society (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2005). 12. Al’pern, L. (ed.), Zhenshchiny i Deti v Rossiiskii Tiur’me: Sbornik Materialov (TsSRUP: Moscow, 2001b), p. 8. 13. A small number of women have babies with them in remand prisons: in 2009, 0.4 per cent of the total; see Geranin, V. V., Podozrevaemye i obviniaemie, soderzhashchiesia v sledstvennykh izoliatorakh. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, Vypusk 7 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011). 14. Ibid., p. 11. 15. Ibid., p. 14. 16. According to the 2009 FSIN census, 48.3 per cent of detainees are charged within 48 hours, and all but 1.9 per cent within 10 days: Geranin, op. cit., p. 67. For English-language discussions of the court process, see Soloman, P., ‘Courts and judges in authoritarian regimes’, World Politics, 60/1 (2007), pp. 122–45; Bowring, B., ‘The Russian Federation’, Protocol no. 14 (and 14 bis), and the battle for the soul of the ECHR’, Göttingen Journal of International Law, 2/2 (2010), pp. 589–617; Jordan, P. A., Defending Rights in Russia: Lawyers, the State, and Legal Reform in the Post-Soviet Era (UBC Press: Vancouver, 2005). 17. The 2009 census returns do not include returns for the length of time women are held in the Sizo after the verdict, but these figures do exist for 1999. In that year 32.5 per cent of women were transported from the Sizo within 10 days, 31.7 per cent from between 10 days to 1 month, 15.2 per cent 1–2 months and 20.6 per cent after 2 months; from Mikhlin, A. S., Kharakteristika, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 59. 18. Geranin, op. cit., p. 80. 19. Of women held in Sizos in 2009, 61.4 per cent had no children under 14, 34.5 per cent had children at home, and 3.7 per cent had children in a care home: Geranin, op. cit., p. 9. 20. Downes, D., Contrasts in Tolerance: Post-War Penal Policy in the Netherlands and England and Wales (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1993), p. 166. 21. King, R. D. and McDermott, K., The State of our Prisons (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1995). 22. Brookman, F. and Pierpont, H., ‘Access to legal advice for young suspects and remand prisoners’, Howard Journal for Criminal Justice, 42/5 (2003), pp. 425–70. 23. Irwin, J. and Owen, B., ‘Harm and the contemporary prison’, in Liebling and Maruna, op. cit., pp. 94–115. 24. The focus group was in 2006 with ten girls whom we had already interviewed. Unfortunately we received no proper transcript so we have had to rely on notes taken afterwards. We explained carefully to the group that cells do not necessarily imply 23-hour lock-ups, and can include single and multiple occupancy arrangements, but they remained firm in their conviction that cellular accommodation was to be avoided. There was only one dissenter from this general view. 25. It was shown on NTV. The first few episodes caused so much protest—because of the depictions of drug-taking, a male rape and bad language—that it was moved to a late evening showing. Nonetheless the serial attracted a large following.

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26. Geranin, op. cit., p. 90, author of the volume on Sizos for the 2009 census, is critical of FSIN’s ‘new concept’, pointing out that even today there are questions that need to be addressed, including providing every remand prisoner with their own bed. 27. See Crewe, B., The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation, and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009). 28. PRI (Penal Reform International) web report into the criminal justice systems of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, available at: http://www.penalreform.org/worldwide/Russia-ukraine-and-belarus [accessed 28 September 2010]. 29. Delmas-Marty, M., ‘The European Union and penal law’, European Law Journal, 4 (1998), pp. 87–115.

7 Etap and Quarantine: the Second Phase of Coerced Mobilization People who are liable for transportation generally have already been through at least three or four stages of the criminal justice system: arrest, the charge, investigation, court, and confinement in an IVS and Sizo; that is, they are already well acquainted with what prison is. They will have been held for a minimum of three months in an overcrowded cell and learned at first hand about prison life. But the etap [the prison transport] exceeds everything that they could imagine, even with all this experience and knowledge. (Liudmila Al’pern, 2004, p. 44)1

In Chapter 6 we argued that women prisoners are subject to coerced mobilization from a first phase, which begins with arrest, to a last phase which ends, most often, with transportation to the penal facility where they will serve their sentence. As prisoners progress through the stages towards transportation, their legal status changes (using the Russian terms, they go from being podozrevaemye (under suspicion), to obviniaemye (accused), to osuzhdennie (convicted)), and at the same time they move through different cells of the remand prison where they are held. Prisoners in Russia live in a less distinctively uniform remand than in the USA, where prisoners are ‘locked in a grim suspended animation’ and secured by impenetrable and highly advanced, modern technological surveillance systems.2 In the Sizo women have to adjust to a very specific prison society; it is the suspended animation of ‘life in the waiting room’.3 Women in the Sizo know that eventually their transport will be called, but they do not know when that will be and, in the meantime, they cannot leave. During this waiting time, they have to adjust to a new life, get to know people, learn the rules of survival in a succession of Sizo cells, but each adaptation and socialization is temporary and unsettled. The second phase of penal zoning, which we discuss in this chapter, brings the waiting to an end. In this chapter we carry forward the thesis of coerced mobilization, this time training attention on transportation to and between different penal facilities and the induction, through quarantine, of women to the place where they will serve their sentence. The ‘escorted transportation’ (konvoirovanie)

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of convicted prisoners to correctional colonies is one of the more invisible processes of the system of penality in Russia. Yet, it has significant consequences for prisoners’ identity and well-being. It is an element whose complexity and impact took us by surprise in the course of the research for this book. The authorities do not recognize it as a distinctive punishment form, and discussion of it is absent from most standard texts on criminal correction law. The movement of prisoners from A to B is treated by the penal authorities as a specific kind of ontological object, ‘a thing’, not as a quality or characteristic, and still less as being associated with the emergence of new forms of subjectivity and emotions in the people being transported. Our research revealed that it is all of these. The transportation of prisoners to and between places of confinement is the responsibility of the Special Convoy Department of the Federal Penal Service— Spetsial’noe podrazdelenie ugolov’no-ispolnitel’noi sistemy po konvoirovaniiu. The department consists of 32 administrations and 39 sub-departments; it is an enormous bureaucracy, but then, it has a big job to do—the transportation of two million prisoners a year.4 The facilities for moving prisoners long distances, as opposed to between prisons and the courts when the regional prison service uses its own vehicles, are rented by FSIN from relevant state organizations, such as the Ministry of Transport or Railways. These latter have to make available to FSIN special trains, carriages, and facilities, such as separate sidings for prisoner transports at railway stations and holding cells, and to accommodate the prison service’s timetabling of prisoner movements. The same applies to the waterway and airline authorities. Some transports of prisoners involve sea and river journeys or can take place by air, but the majority of long-distance transfers are made by train with connecting transfers between railheads and transit prisons, Sizos, and colonies by van. The convoy has considerable powers with respect to prisoners, including the power of search and the use of armed force. It also has rights to search the vehicles and facilities made available to it by the civilian authorities and, if there is an escape, to check the documents of ordinary citizens and search possible hiding places. Semi-officially, the conveyance of prisoners is still referred to by prison personnel as the process of transportation—etapirovanie—and specific transfers as a ‘transport’ or etap. Both names have come down to the present from the gulag and before. Etap has a second meaning, as ‘stage’ or ‘phase’, which hints at its role marking the transition of the prisoner from ‘convict in waiting’ to ‘confirmed’ convict. In prison slang, another quality of the transportation is alluded to; it is known as the estafeta—‘relay-race’. It becomes obvious why below. The prison journey reveals it to have a disciplining sensibility that evolves en route to the colonies. Prisoners have little time to develop and maintain agency during transportation; the precise moment of departure to the colony can be sudden and unexpected in the middle of the night, journeys can be long and follow circuitous routes, and they can be punctuated by overnight to week-long stays in transit prisons or in railway sidings, and transfers between transport media. All the while, the prisoner can be kept in ignorance of where she is going, when any section of the journey will resume or end, when she will arrive at her final destination.

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One legally-trained prisoner we interviewed said that when she asked why she could not be told where she was being taken, she was told that the ‘extenuating circumstance’ was the fact that she had committed a crime; for her interlocutor, at least, the prison transport was understood as punishment. It is unlikely, though, that this view would be openly articulated by many penal personnel today, since the new reform concept recognizes that there are deficiencies in the current system of prison convoys. Accordingly, it contains a provision ‘to improve the organization of “special movements” through the optimization of convoy routes and better coordination [of FSIN] with state organizations involved in supporting the convoy of people under guard’.5 There are further pledges to expand the use of global positioning systems, to equip carriages and vehicles with the most up-todate means of surveillance, and to increase the personnel numbers. These solutions do not address the fundamental issue of the punitive element of the fact of transporting prisoners long distances, although any improvement in timetabling that reduces its length would, obviously, be welcome. Western academics have developed some nuanced conceptualizations of mobility that reflect its role in reinforcing power, but the focus of empirical work has been on access to mobility and exclusion from it. By comparison, little attention has been paid to the relationship between mobility and power, where mobility is itself an instrument of power. Thus, whilst the existing literature acknowledges ‘involuntary’, forced and even coerced movements, its focus is on subjects who, nevertheless, retain some limited autonomy; social or political obligation may be overwhelming, but it can be resisted.6 Largely missing from the mobilities literature is consideration of the sort of coerced movement where individual autonomy is completely absent, such as in extraordinary rendition, kidnap, or, as here, the transportation of prisoners. Notwithstanding this deficiency, there are interesting insights to be gained from work on mobile bodies—on the waiting room and airport departure lounge, the visual field and affective atmospheres in train travel, the materialities of travel, the corporeal sensation of travel, and the ‘society of passengers’—that are suggestive of how we might understand the experience of coerced transportation.

The journey to the penal colony: time The journey to prison continues the process of acclimatization begun in the Sizo and the preparation for what is to follow. For the majority of women ‘what follows’ is confinement in a correctional colony (83.4 per cent of all women receiving a custodial sentence in 2009), with small numbers destined for colonysettlements (10.6 per cent), medical isolation facilities or prison hospitals (3.4 per cent), or retained in the Sizo.7 Transportation brings with it the need for women to adjust to different forms of surveillance, disciplinary regimes, and ‘direction of travel’ from the Sizo. The principal concerns that surfaced in the talk of the women we interviewed were about their lack of information about the journey (which they

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experienced as punitive and was understood by some as intentionally so) and the conditions they were forced to endure. In a phrase that unconsciously referenced the waiting room, one woman described prisoners after sentence as ‘sitting on their suitcases’, in a perpetual state of ‘waiting to move’. The suitcase reference emphasizes that there is a material dimension to coerced mobility; prisoners do not to go empty-handed to colonies. Before departure they try to gather together things they will need for the journey and in the colony: ‘How the women travel—a wash basin, buckets, three trunks and candles, a blanket and pillow’ (Pr 61). These practical necessities are also the last signifiers of their former identity and link with home. Most objects will have to be surrendered by the prisoner when she arrives at the colony. The image of sitting on the suitcase is also evocative of the ‘hopelessness, lassitude and despair’ that appeared in nineteenth-century representations of the forced migrants.8 Courts in Russia sentence prisoners to particular categories of penal facility and regime (rezhim soderzhaniia), the latter determining their entitlements to visits and so on, but not to particular places. This is ultimately decided by FSIN, although normally decisions are devolved to a lower level and involve the allocation of prisoners within established catchments linking particular remand prisons and colonies. Women from Moscow, for example, would normally expect to be sent to Mordoviia or Mozhaisk, or if they are juveniles to L’govo education colony. But there is never certainty, since where someone finally ends up depends upon colonies’ capacity, whether the prisoner has a child with her, her health status, and, occasionally, on higher politically- or personally-inspired interventions. In theory, the Sizo authority is supposed to inform a family member nominated by the prisoner what is her destination colony, but the experience of some participants in our study was different: neither they nor their relatives received this information. The full degree of uncertainty is indicated in the following extracts from conversations with two former prisoners: In the first place, they don’t tell you where they are sending you . . . We were in the dark about it, and when they fetched us for the transport, they didn’t mention it. It’s not talked about. I was told that it’s a secret. You get ready, and you go on transport, and that’s it. (Ex-Pr 13) INTERVIEWER: So you were travelling but you didn’t know where to? INTERVIEWEE: I didn’t know. INTERVIEWER: Even when you were on the train? INTERVIEWEE: We talked about it in Syzran [a transit point on her route]; there the girls sat together with me and they asked what’s going on, where are we going? I could only say, ‘I don’t know where we’re going.’ (Ex-Pr 4)

One of our interviewees told us that the guards on the train made a ‘joke’ about the destination invoking the gulag and Far North: We were herded into these rooms, and the convoy arrived to collect us. [One of them] knocked on the door. ‘Where are you going? To Vorkuta, where people from the south like to holiday.’9 (Ex-Pr 9)

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The failure of prison officials to pass on information, if indeed they have it, means that prisoners enter a liminal space during their transportation. It is not, in fact, until ten days after their arrival at a colony that the authorities are required to inform relatives of the prisoner’s whereabouts, and the prisoners have no—legal— way of communicating this to those waiting to hear. To all intents and purposes, until this information is received the prisoner has ‘vanished’: No one told me where I was going. My father and brother didn’t even know. My uncle found out through the police. I’d been in Riazan’ for a month before my family knew where I had gone. (J-Pr 10)

Even when women know their destination, there is never any certainty about the likely duration of the journey or its route. Railway transports are organized to ‘gather up’ prisoners from transit prisons and Sizos spread over a wide area and, as a result, individual prisoners can be taken on circuitous routes to their destination colony; hence their likening of it to a relay-race. Distances travelled can be vast, with what is normally a two-day train journey being turned into a month-long meander across Russia, with multiple sojourns in transit cells. Time on the move, therefore, is only a portion of the time taken in transportation: as one woman from Arkhangel’sk oblast noted, ‘the travel time was actually quite quick. We left in the day and were there by night, but I was kept in a transit prison in Vologda for a week’ (Pr 54). As Table7.1 shows, women are disproportionately affected by the duration of transportation compared with men, a function of the more limited number of their colonies. These figures are from 1999 and were not updated in the 2009 census. It is probable that there has been an improvement for women since then, because of the liquidation of strict regime colonies, but with no overall increase in the number of colonies and overcrowding a problem the improvement is likely to have been slight. The 1999 census did not give separate figures for juvenile women, who must experience the longest transportation time for any category of prisoner since there are just three colonies for them in the whole of the Russian Federation. The Table 7.1. The length of time that it took adult women and men to be transported to correctional colonies, according to the 1999 FSIN census of prisoners Time taken to be transported (including time spent in transit facilities)

Correctional colonies for women Standard regime

Under 10 days 10 days to 1 month More than 1 month Total

67.2 21.9 10.9 100.0

Strict regime 46.1 30.9 23.0 100.0

Correctional colonies for men

Total

Total

66.0 22.4 11.6 100.0

79.3 10.8 9.9 100.0

Source: Mikhlin, A. S., Kharakteristika osuzhdennykh k lisheniiu svobody. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi, 1999 (The characteristics of prisoners: materials of a special census, 1999), vol. 1 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), p. 61.

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Key to routes: Arkhangel’sk – Yaroslavl‘ – Smolensk – Voronezh – Riazan’ Ukhta – Smolensk – Voronezh – Riazan‘ Vologda – Yaroslavl’ – Voronezh – Riazan’ Kirov – Tver – Smolensk – Tver – Voronezh – Riazan‘ Ekaterinburg – Perm’ – Kazan – Ulianovsk – Riazan‘ Kurgan – Cheliabinsk – Riazan’ Ivanovo – Yaroslavl‘ – Smolensk – Voronezh – Tula – Riazan’ Moscow – Kolomna – Riazan’ Ioshkar Ola – Kazan – Saratov – Voronezh – Riazan’

Shared route, following convergence

Arkhangel’sk Arkhangelsk

Tver

Vologda

INS

Ukhta

Smolensk Yaroslavl’ Yaroslavl Ivanovo Tula Riazan’ Riazan’

Ioshkar Ola

Kirov Perm’

Voronezh

MMOO UUN N

TTA

MOSCOW MOSCOW

Kazan Ekaterinburg

Ulianovsk Saratov

Kurgan

U

R

AA L

L

Cheliabinsk

K A Z A K H S TA N

Fig. 7.1. The transportation routes taken from the remand prison to colony for a selection of juvenile offenders held in L’govo VK (educational colony) Riazan’ in 2006.

girls we interviewed in the L’govo juvenile colony spoke of two- to three-month trips. We have discussed their experiences in an earlier paper, but we show some of them graphically in Figure 7.1.10 Adult women generally do not have to endure such long journeys as juveniles, but still, as Table 7.1 indicates, their journeys can last from ten days to over a

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month, and some for longer. Two prisoners, we shall call them Irina and Yana, both sentenced in Omsk and sent to the women’s colony in Ivanovo, some 2,000 kilometres away, described the routes they were taken thus: [The transport took] two weeks – well, it was less than a month. In April I started out and I got here in May. I arrived here on the13th of May. [There were] three stops on the way . . . at Kirov, Sverdlovsk [Ekaterinburg], Ivanovo. (Irina) I was on the transport for a long time. I started sometime in the middle of October, [and] I arrived here late in January, the 21st of January. I went through Cheliabinsk, then Saratov, Nizhnii-Novgorod, Samara, and then here. (Yana)

A former prisoner described the interrupted journey that she endured: I never saw Vologda. We were transported in closed vehicles. I was lucky, because I was driven [by car] out of Briansk. From Briansk, we drove for three days, I think. We spent a night in a Stolypin [train wagon for prisoners], and it was crazily hot, up to 40 degrees. You know what it’s like for us women, nothing to drink, nowhere to wash. Then I was in Iaroslavl’ prison. Then I was moved again and finally the train brought me here, and I was in the transit prison there for three weeks [before the final leg to the colony by van]. I was travelling for something like a month, no, a bit less. I left on the 4th and hit the colony on the 26th. (Pr 57)

Knowledge of Russian geography is needed to understand how bizarre are the routes followed in these cases (Figure 7.2).

300 km

Irina’s route Yana’s route

UANI T T NASI

NS

0

Ivanovo Ivanovo

MOSCOW MOSCOW

M UN O

Kirov Kirov

MO

Nizhnii Nizhnii Novgorod Novgorod

Saratov Saratov

Samara Samara

Ekaterinburg Ekaterinburg

Omsk Omsk

UR

AL

Cheliabinsk Cheliabinsk

KAZAKHSTAN

Fig. 7.2. The transportation routes taken from the remand prison to Ivanovo colony for two adult offenders.

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These examples suggest that we are right to consider the process of ‘sending prisoners out of the region’ as ‘transportation’ in the historical, penological sense. Some of our respondents, in fact, referred to it as exile. The time taken, the circuitous routes, and the suspension of communication with home cannot but create in prisoners a sense of estrangement, intensifying the damage and harm already inflicted on them during their period in the Sizo. The prison transport underlines their physical separation from children and significant others and from their former identity, in a process geographers refer to as ‘distanciation’. As we shall see below, transportation is also a space where the standard degradation routines of confinement are played out, as described so well by Gresham Sykes in his ‘society of captives’ thesis, including poor food rations, barking dogs, surveillance, flow control, loss of self and autonomy. But more than all these effects, the transfer of women from remand prison to correctional colonies creates an impaired sense of geography. It has to be remembered that a large subset of women prisoners belong to the lowest socio-economic groups and have not completed secondary education. For these women the prison transport may be their first experience of long-distance travel; this was certainly the case with the majority of juveniles we interviewed in L’govo who had not previously been out of their home region. As an example, the industrial town of Ukhta, home of one of the interview subjects in L’govo, is a long way away from the colony. The relative location of the two places is difficult enough for a young girl (who may not have concentrated hard in her geography lessons) to place in her geographical image of Russia, but when it has taken two months to get from one to the other, the sense of being ‘far away’ is multiplied several-fold. Small wonder that prisoners talked of being in a foreign country. As one prisoner commented, ‘You are going to another country. It’s a closed location’ (Pr 57). It is a frightening experience: ‘We were travelling, of course, with a sense of fear of going into the unknown, to a new place’ (Pr 54). And small wonder that one juvenile from Perm’ and sentenced to Novyi Oskol, when asked about the location of the colony, answered, ‘I don’t really know where I am’; and another, that as far as she could tell she could be on the Black Sea coast. Here we concur with Beckett and Herbert, who argue that the disciplining power of exile and banishment expands punishment, taking the capillary of power into the arena of transportation through space.11 Exile is an emotional and physical experience which, moreover, has powerful symbolic effects. Returning briefly here to the gulag archipelago, this giant penal monolith expanded excessively and grotesquely beyond conventional incarceration. It built itself into the landscape of the USSR in order to populate new lands and create new urban landscapes. The penal system did, indeed, create another country inside what was presented as a dynamic and triumphant superpower. The conceptualization of this penal identity surfacing in the talk of the prisoners suggests that historical references to the gulag, though problematic, are not separate from how some women in our study understand what awaits them. When prisoners talked about going to ‘another country’ or told us that it is normal for Russians ‘to be sent to katorga’ (using the pre-revolutionary word for Siberian hard labour), or that women from the Far North

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are ‘in exile’ in colonies further south, they are positioning themselves within a historical stereotype about Russian incarceration as exile. But these comments also reinforce the point that alternative interpretations of what is happening to them cannot be found during the arduous journey to the penal colony; transportation is a Soviet legacy whose discursive meanings are deeply embedded in Russian culture. Even before they reach the places of their confinement, women prisoners struggle to make connections between place and their own identity. The broad question of ‘who am I?’ for the women in our study is an actively constructed question, the answer to which is delayed until she reaches the colony and becomes subject to penal intervention strategies.

The journey to the penal colony: space The train burst out of the town into the open countryside. It was the second half of August. We caught the smell of the fields. Birds perched on telegraph cables like notes on a stave of music. We were going to Yaroslavl’, a light blue town, cool and clean. I had been there in 1934 with my husband. Now it seemed the colour of lead. The wheels rattled – ‘with e-ve-ry step, with e-ve-ry step’. (Evgenia Ginzburg, 1967, p. 145)12

The prisoners interviewed for the study were invited to talk about conditions of the transportation. They confirmed that the train wagons in prison transports were divided into cells opening on a corridor on one side and that, typically, they had no outside windows. The corridor is patrolled by guards who have to escort prisoners to the washroom at the end of the wagon. The inability during the long journeys to see out of windows deprives prisoners of the waymarks that tell passengers on ‘normal journeys’ where they are. Furthermore, unlike transatlantic emigrants or refugees fleeing danger, prisoners are not afforded the possibility of the last ‘glimpse of home’ to take with them on the journey into the unknown.13 The reification of the visual that researchers into different modes of travel have observed suggests that experience of travel without the accompaniment of the changing external landscape vista through a window is likely to have a significant effect. Unlike normal train passengers, prisoners have no visual references to estimate the speed of their travel, cannot tell whether they are travelling north, south, east, or west by the rising or the setting sun, and cannot guess their location by the nature of the surrounding landscape. Here is how one respondent described the carriage: [The train carriage is] the same as a normal train; well, that is, it’s the same but with bars and everything, no windows, and the locomotive is different . . . Of course, guards went with us . . . Each of us . . . that is, women went separately, there was a metal grille with a lock, and bunk beds like usual on a train, but with the bars. That is, women and men were separate, more women then men, and then more men. All the guards were men. When we arrived at the zone [the prison complex], all the guards were wearing masks. Just black masks, and they said that that’s just how it is . . . that’s the rule. (Ex-Pr 4)

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The prisoner is describing a Stolypin wagon, which in Russia is as iconic of penal transport as is the boxcar of the Holocaust. Equally iconic are the windowless vans, which during the gulag were disguised as bread delivery vans, in which prisoners are taken on the final leg of their trip to the colonies. Today vans are not disguised, but we were surprised at how many times we were told that the final leg of the journey to the colony from transit prison or railway station was made at night, after dark. The absence of windows means that prisoners being transported in enclosed vehicles focus their attention on interior spaces, which are characterized by the generic visual language of the prison—bars, locks, guards, and dogs. Not surprisingly, the younger women we interviewed in the L’govo colony sometimes found it difficult to find words to describe the experience of transportation: ‘It was awful. We sat in a cage on the train, guards walked up and down carrying machine guns, and there were dogs barking at us’ (J-Pr 6). In the trains, prisoners are corporeally restricted in terms of nutrition, access to the toilet, and washing facilities. Many commented on overcrowding, which in the summer made it unbearably hot and difficult to breathe, whilst those who were transported in winter complained of the cold. One former prisoner described the rations on her transport: The rations were terrible, they barely fed us. A jar of dried potatoes, and a jar of dry cereal, but no one gave us any hot water. We only got hot water to wash after 12 hours of travelling. We hardly ate anything, apart from what we had on us, like biscuits, or sweets. That’s how it was. Just plain scary. (Ex-Pr 3)

Prisoners described the personnel’s transgression of certain rules. These included leaving women in compartments in excessively high or low temperatures, not separating prisoners with TB and other infectious diseases from one another, and combining juveniles and adults in the same cell. Beyond these flagrant violations, the women spoke of the demeaning behaviour of the guards and lack of courtesy. In the introduction to this book we described guards’ behaviour on a contemporary transport from Moscow to Pot’ma in Mordoviia, but ‘Soniia’s’ description is not atypical. The words of one former prisoner succinctly sums up the general problem: ‘They beat up the men, and they are condescending to the women.’ She continued to complain that the guards refused to take women to the bathroom or to attend to the ill: INTERVIEWER: What if a person became ill? EX-PR: They’d just say, ‘Don’t die’. We didn’t matter. We were the dregs of society. INTERVIEWER: Was there any human sensitivity at all? EX-PR: No, none at all. (Ex-Pr 9)

The poor conditions of prison rail transports apply also to other transport media. Another prisoner describes conditions in the van in which she was transported to her colony:

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I don’t know for certain how long it took . . . two weeks we waited in the transit prison and then we were driven to the colony . . . in an ‘avtozek’ [slang for a secure van for transporting people who have been arrested or prisoners, which literally translated means ‘auto-convict’]. It took about two hours, maybe less, 90 minutes – and it was slow. There were 30 people . . . We were crammed together and my legs went completely numb. (Ex-Pr 16)

Judging from our interviews, therefore, transportation for many women prisoners is an intimidating, difficult, and disorientating experience. Research on how travellers fill their travel time details activities such as working, reading, using mobile electronic equipment, and listening to music.14 These are activities that are barely relevant to the conditions of prison transports. But women do use their time during transportation: to make relationships, to share information, and to give and seek reassurance. In this respect, they are engaged in what may be referred to as the ‘production’ of travel time: an array of ‘distinct social practices involving different kinds of experience, performance, and communication.’15 Prisoners spoke to us about having to ‘get on’ with their fellow passengers in the cramped conditions of the prison transport, and it seems that, for some, a sense of comradeship developed through close proximity and shared adversity, so that they may be understood as forming communities of the sort that have been observed on normal train journeys.16 One juvenile prisoner, unusually, insisted that the journey to L’govo was ‘fun’ as the girls could socialize with boys in the next cell ‘in the Stolypin’. Friendships can be made that endure in the colonies: ‘You stay acquainted with the other women you meet during transportation’ (Pr 49) and ‘you bond with people you feel it’s right with’ (Pr 48). At the same time, the transportation is the last occasion when prisoners are permitted the accessories of freedom, their civilian clothes, and other personal belongings from their former life; and yet, to take up Ginzburg’s words above, with ‘e-ve-ry step’, with ‘e-ve-ry step’ the prisoner is taken physically further way from the configuration of emplaced relationships and events that formed her previous identity. In summary, Russian prison transports act directly as a form of coercive power over prisoners, inscribing them with a set of historical and culturally specific norms. As on numerous other occasions during the course of our research, we were forced to ask ourselves in relation to transportation whether the treatment of women prisoners is a conscious strategy to render them docile or whether it is just the conservative behaviour of the inherited penal behemoth that nobody has been moved, so far, to change. A member of the regional penal authority was anxious to tell us that the process of re-socialization begins as soon as a woman arrives at the colony, leaving hanging the question of what precisely the penal service has been trying to achieve in the months leading up to this moment. One answer to this question may be to refer back to the prisoner whom we quoted in Chapter 6 who said that women arrive at correctional colonies ‘already broken’.

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Quarantine and adaptation The idea of imprisonment as a complex social phenomenon has been explored fully, firstly by Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939), who argued that systems of punishment cannot be reduced to the level of crime control, which is the same as arguing that the punishment of crime is not the single or sole element of penality.17 Because the propensity of punishment that developed in Europe alongside the development of capitalism was to oppress, exclude, and eliminate, systems of punishments must be situated within a distinctive political economy of the body. As Foucault argued, the forces of the body—their ‘utility and docility’, their distribution and submission—are mobilized into a direct field of power relations that impel the body towards certain tasks and goals: Power produces knowledge . . . power and knowledge directly imply one another . . . there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These ‘power–knowledge relations’ are to be analysed [on the basis of] the subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power–knowledge and their historical transformations.18

Looking back at the history of penal practices in Europe and the Soviet Union, we see how organizations, practices, bodies of knowledge, legal measures, control measures, and risk assessments have sought to take the prisoner out of the setting of ‘the prison’ and into a set of social relations that allocate the task of punishment to managers, policing bodies, medical experts, social workers, and schools. Foucault viewed power in a distinct way as something that is de-centred, but insisted that it is complementary to and should not rival politics. Returning to our study, following their time in the Sizo and having been transported, prisoners arrive at the colony where their sentences are to be served, passing first through quarantine and then into the colony proper. For those who have spent an extended period in an overcrowded Sizo and have then endured a gruelling journey to the colony, arrival can come as a relief; but adjustment to colony life brings its own challenges. Prisoners describe the shock of arrival at the colony both in terms of the material reality of life, and the realization that this will be their ‘own reality’ for an extended period of time. Some describe a quick process of adjustment, helped by an attitude of acceptance rather than resistance and, in some cases, support from home; whereas others remember a much longer and more difficult period of adaptation, in which they turned for help to fellow inmates or to the prison personnel. Yet others deny that adaptation to prison life is ever possible. New arrivals’ first impressions of the colony are formed in the initial two weeks when they are kept in a quarantine block. Groups of prisoners proceed through quarantine together, which consists of their being assessed by a commission that makes decisions about individuals’ management. The first stage of quarantine

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involves an initial examination of the prisoner: the documentation that arrived with them is checked, their belongings are searched and illegal articles removed, they are subjected to a medical examination to identify whether they are suffering from infectious diseases or have any immediate physical or psychological needs. In the case of juveniles, they have an ‘individual conversation’ with a member of the operations department in order to determine whether they have concealed any relationships with other new arrivals.19 Once these initial checks have been made, a ‘full sanitary cleansing’ completed, and prison uniforms issued, the women are sent to their quarantine dormitories. In the second stage of quarantine, the medical examination continues with more detailed investigation of prisoners’ health status, and an analysis is made of each woman’s personality and lichnost’—her character, intelligence, and level of educational deficit—and the women are ‘introduced to the regime’—the rules of the colony—and told about the penalties for rulebreaking. They are informed about the surveillance techniques used in the colony and the circumstances under which physical force can be used against them.20 By the time the fifteen days are up, the colony has created a profile of the prisoner; and the prisoner, for her part, knows that all aspects of her have been observed, noted, and recorded. The body of the woman prisoner has, indeed, been mobilized into the correctional colony’s field of power relations that will be directed towards the fulfilment of the required tasks and goals, which are compliance, labour, and personal rehabilitation. This is the production of Foucauldian power–knowledge in the most direct way imaginable, and evidence of the penal service’s current aim to individualize the management of prisoners otherwise obscured by the perpetuation of colonies’ traditional collectivist practices. The immediate outcome of the intensive assessment of a new arrival is that she is allocated to the detachment where, the expectation is, she will spend the whole period of her confinement. The allocation is made on the basis of the individual psychological, socio-demographic, criminological, and other features of the woman’s personality, specialist skills, and type of work to which she is suited.21 It was obvious from our conversations with prisoners that quarantine is a stressful time, during which they face their fears about what life in the colony holds for them. One prisoner described her first thoughts on arrival in quarantine some years before: When I arrived, I looked around and thought, ‘My God, I’m here for ten years’. We were all in quarantine together, because everyone who was there, all those people with whom I was in the Sizo, we were all there together in quarantine. And everyone was trembling, thinking about what’s waiting for us. (Pr 52)

Women recalled visits from personnel from the different services—prison psychologists, representatives of the operations and internal security departments, and detachment heads—and how they explained prisoners’ rights and responsibilities and tried to impress upon them that their life would be easier if they followed regime rules. Psychology personnel are there to assist in dealing with anxiety and problems of adaptation.

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Although the briefings in quarantine are ostensibly about smoothing the transition into the colony, different aspects of the conversations lingered in women’s minds. One woman remembered the help which a conversation with the head of a detachment gave her: ‘[She’s] a good person. I talked with her, and discussed how I’m going to live here, what I’m going to do, and whether I’m homesick or not’ (Pr 56). But many found that the briefings felt more like an assessment of their ‘robustness’ and ability to work, or the words passed over their heads: A psychologist came to test us, and we all filled out a questionnaire. Then, when we had been allocated [to detachments], the heads came and asked whether we’d ever sewn garments before and whether we knew how to do it. (Pr 39) They spoke mainly about the internal regulations. I don’t remember it very well, because I didn’t attach any importance to it at the time. I heard it, but it didn’t go into my head. (Pr 52)

After quarantine comes the process of settling into colony life as a member of a detachment. In some colonies, women in responsible positions in the detachments visit the quarantine block to talk about settling in, ‘from the prisoner perspective’. One prisoner described such a meeting: She came in the morning until lunch time, and then again in the evening. So, she’s a person who’s already here, in this institution, serving time, and she already has experience, and she told us about it all. So, it helps people who are scared, and maybe they are frightened about something. She talks about the regime, about work, and gives out other information. It already seemed clear and easier to get some kind of plan in my own head about being in the detachment. (Pr 51)

Regardless of the attempts to reassure, women still find the transition to the zoneproper fairly daunting. Passing from the quarantine to their detachment block is a difficult transition, as new arrivals encounter the daily routine of the prison and the plethora of rules and regulations governing their daily lives. Entering the dormitory for the first time is described by some as alarming and ‘foreign’: [The worst thing] was the massive number of women; well, I’d never been among such numbers of women before, and the women are all different and I didn’t know anyone. Basically, I was like a zombie, just like a zombie. (Pr 39) And the prisoners, I couldn’t understand their language. I had to live here for some time, to understand, and to master it. Perhaps that’s why it took me a long time [to adapt]. (Pr 55)

We were not able to develop our research to examine how prisoners’ adaptation impacts on their offending behaviours, but work in other jurisdictions has shown that prisoners must accommodate themselves into the culture of the prison (whether they do this through legal or illegal activities or forms of cognitive minimization of the experience of imprisonment).22 We take adaptation to refer to how prisoners cope with the twin tensions of confinement as a social control mechanism in a rigid living environment and their ability to draw on support from a variety of sources to help them to survive the general bleakness of imprisonment.

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We prefer to view it in this bifurcated way rather than understanding it as something that can be explicitly defined by, for example, how far women succumb to rules and regulations that are centrally located within the social control process (which is how the Russian penal authorities define it). That prisoners are powerless inside an oppressive authority contributes to their ‘learned helplessness’, where choice is restricted and control is increased, turning what could be perceived as ‘abnormal’ into ‘normal behaviour’.23 In this environment, ‘doing gender’ becomes something to alter and adapt both physically and cognitively, because rules and practices in penal space are modified to reflect expectations of prisoners as ‘female’ offenders. We take this argument forward in the chapters following. In Russia, adaptation as we have defined it here is further affected by the distance that prisoners have travelled physically and symbolically from the Sizo, as well as by more conventional determinants, such as the length of sentence, the nature and severity of the crime, and the prisoner’s mental and physical wellbeing. The stretching of space and time affects adaptation. Maintaining a connection with family is important in adjusting to prison life, and those women who had relatives who were able to visit told us that they found it easier than others to adapt. But upsetting events on the outside, such as a family bereavement, were magnified in the colony and could impact negatively on adaptation. For one prisoner we interviewed, the death of her mother shortly after she arrived in the correctional colony made the adaptation process long and painful. Prison personnel acknowledged the importance of support from home, but argued that adaptation was always individual and didn’t depend on prisoners’ distance from relatives. Our evidence contradicts this assertion, as women who were imprisoned in their home city seemed to adapt better than those who came from far away. In the next chapter we will discuss patterns of visitation in women’s colonies and how these map onto feelings of being ‘out of place’. Nevertheless, the role of personality in adaptation was acknowledged by prisoners. Women who reported that they had settled in quickly attributed this to their personality and approach; one called it ‘just tuning in’. Two prisoners, sentenced respectively to 18 years and 7 years 5 months, described their experiences thus: I’m not the sort of person who commits violations. I don’t smoke. It was easy for me to adjust to the regime. A uniform is just a uniform. I just don’t break the rules. So it’s not hard for me. (Pr 62) You could say that I became accustomed to it quickly, yes, that is, I realized immediately that the regime, it’s the regime. It wasn’t difficult for me. And now, I’m too lazy to do anything. (Pr 58)

Both these women were prepared to conform to the regime and, as prison research has shown in other jurisdictions, abiding by the rules is fundamental to quick adaptation.24 Although the briefing in quarantine makes prisoners aware of the prison personnel to whom they can turn for help, many who turned to others for help preferred initially to look for support from other prisoners:

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Other prisoners helped me the most. We more or less found a common language, which supported me. People in my detachment genuinely supported me, advised me, and helped me. (Pr 52)

This prisoner’s experience was common. The detachment, as we shall see in a later chapter, is a complex society that is not always easy for newcomers to read. Their inferior status in detachment society is signalled immediately in the allocation of their ‘place’. Newcomers are given top bunks; a lower bunk or separate bed has to be ‘earned’. But we were told many stories of how new arrivals are taken under the wing of older and more experienced inmates when they first arrived, and of women gathering round to show the newcomers the ropes. Furthermore, it is obvious that prisoners were prepared to alert the authorities if they felt someone was really struggling: Maybe because I looked disturbed, and I didn’t talk to anyone. Maybe I missed the moment, so to speak, when I could do anything about it myself. I think now that it was a good thing [that they spoke to the prison personnel]. And the head of the detachment and other staff sent for me. They all explained to me that, in a sense, if you act normally then you’ll have a normal life. I told them that I’m just here to survive. So they sent me to the psychologist and I told her everything that’s weighing me down. They put me in the infirmary, gave me an injection, and I went back to work. (Pr 39)

Other prisoners told us that they approached prison personnel directly, such as one facing a 20-year sentence, who drew some comfort from her conversations with the prison psychologist: It helped. Perhaps she was the first person from the administration with whom I could talk about an abstract theme, even just about life, what it’s all about. (Pr 55)

Asked how long adaptation takes, prisoners gave answers that ranged from two or three months to two years. Getting used to the daily routine, the rules, day-to-day events, and so on was something that could be achieved within six months, but really getting to know the system took much longer, as this prisoner explained: It took me a few months, probably three or four. That’s to understand the people, who does what. But to understand completely – a year, not less, for everything. I mean, all the correct behaviour. This takes a year. Because it’s like someone has spent half a year and thinks, that’s it, I know everything. But the next day you may encounter situations you don’t know how to get out of. So, you need a year, a year in the colony, to understand everything. (Pr 56)

Prison personnel concurred; this is from a former head of correction in one colony: You know, a month or two is only to learn the routine – when to get up, where to go and what to do . . . I think that maybe it’s a year, until everything is more or less understandable, perhaps a little less, until she knows who people are, who she is dealing with, those around her. I think the period of adaptation is about a year.

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Although some prisoners report that they adjusted very quickly to prison life, perhaps reflecting the shorter period of learning the rules and regulations, there were some who deny that they would ever adapt: I’m just resigned to it. I haven’t adapted, I’m just resigned to it. I’m just waiting for 2010 [release], just serving the time and nothing more. (Pr 47)

Settling into life in the colony means coming to terms with the nature of communal living in the detachment and the formation of personal relationships with other prisoners, issues which are covered in Chapter 10.

Conclusion Chapters 6 and 7 have revealed distinctive points not only about the very early phases of penal confinement for women prisoners in Russia, but also about how women experience discipline through mobilization. The waiting room analogy that we referred to earlier seems pertinent to the discussion of remand in Russia, because the absence of information on sentence management and planning, failed appeals, and the generally austere living conditions of the Sizo mean that women on leaving remand are often aggravated and anxious about what lies ahead and already disconnected from home; many simply do not know where they are going. Significant changes have yet to be made regarding improving conditions and standards for women prisoners on remand and their subsequent transportation. For all the reforms that have been introduced since 1991, it would seem that women still suffer inadequate personal hygiene provision and material living conditions, and we were given no positive reports regarding appeals and the engagement with legal representatives. Most of the women described the Sizo as ‘prison’, but whilst being held on remand imposed on women a sense of prisonization, they also displayed uncertainty about their status. The women were disciplined in the Sizo, subject to the same pains of imprisonment as sentenced prisoners, and were poorly informed about their rights. The women’s lives described to us were ‘in transit’, invisible and full of fear and dread about the next penal phase they would encounter. Transportation revealed to us particularly concerning aspects of the penal process and punishment. The visual deprivations associated with the forms that mobility took suggest to us a dual disciplinarity: firstly transportation is coercive, and secondly it acts to discipline the mobile subject, rendering it ‘bare life’. For all prisoners, imprisonment does little to raise self-worth. For women prisoners, however, there are multiple patriarchal sub-texts also, from convoy guards referring to women as ‘girls’ during transportation, to indignities arising from poor resources allocated to sanitary supplies. Research into the gender-related ways that imprisonment operates suggests commonalities between women held all around the world.25 However, the psychological experience of being ‘on the move’ shapes the social processes of integration into the awaiting colony and the inevitable loss of

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agency through time and the physical circumstances of travel. In a sense, women prisoners vanish inside ‘black-box mobility’, at the mercy of convoy personnel until they reappear at a prison colony. These issues are picked up throughout the book, but here we contrast the sense of exile with the sense of prisonization, which we adapt here from Clemmer’s classic 1958 study, The Prison Community, in which he describes the folkways and customs that every prisoner takes on to varying degrees.26 Where we differ from the broader body of prison sociology research on prisonization is that we take the prisonization thesis out of the prison and locate it on the penal phasing spectrum that begins with remand and is later shaped by transportation. We argue that the onset of prisonization is not to be located in confinement but in mobility, which creates dynamic and contingent inmate consciousness. We argue, further, that not only can transportation be described as coerced mobility in terms of its limitation of agency, but that the experience of transportation serves directly as a form of disciplinary power, in which travel time facilitates the acclimatization of prisoners to the institution of the prison. That disciplinary power is further exposed in the two weeks that women are held in quarantine.

Notes 1. Al’pern, L., Son i Iav’ Zhenskoi Tiur’my (Aleteiia: St Petersburg, 2004), p. 44. 2. Johnson, R., ‘Brave new prisons: the growing social institution of modern penal institutions’, in A. Liebling and S. Maruna (eds), The Effect of Imprisonment (Sage: London, 2005), p. 255. 3. For a discussion of the psychological states and social dynamics of waiting passengers, see Bissell, D., ‘Animated suspension: waiting for mobilities’, Mobilities, 2/2 (2007), pp. 277–98. 4. Kontseptsiia razvitiia ugolovno-ispolnitel’noi sistemy Rossiiskii Federatsii do 2020, utverzhdena rasporiazheniem Pravitel’stvo Rossiiskii Federatsii ot 14ogo oktobria 2010 g. no. 1772-R, p. 1. 5. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 6. Examples of this are of refugees, forced migrants, the homeless. See Cloke P., Milbourne, P., and Widdowfield, R., ‘The complex mobilities of homeless people in rural England’, Geoforum, 34/1 (2003), pp. 21–35; Hannan, K., Sheller, M., and Urry, J., ‘Editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings’, Mobilities, 1/1 (2006), pp. 1–22. 7. Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009,Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), p. 42. 8. Basu, P. and Coleman, S., ‘Introduction: migrant worlds, material cultures’, Mobilities, 3/3 (2008), p. 314. The example that they develop in their work is the painting by J. Watson-Nicol, Lochaber No More (1883), of emigrants to the USA bidding farewell to the Scottish Highlands. 9. Vorkuta is a town in the Komi Republic, in the Arctic Circle. Under Stalin, it was a destination for forced labourers in the gulag. There are men’s colonies in Vorkuta but not women’s. The guard’s ‘joke’ was cruel. 10. For a fuller discussion, see Piacentini, L., Pallot, J., and Moran, D., ‘Welcome to Malaya Rodina (Little Homeland): gender and penal order in a Russian penal colony’, Social & Legal Studies, 18/4 (2009), pp. 523–42. 11. Beckett, K. and Herbert, S., ‘Penal boundaries: banishment and the expansion of punishment’, Law & Social Inquiry, 35/1 (2010), pp. 1–38. 12. Ginzburg, E., Into the Whirlwind (Harvill Collins: London, 1967), p. 145.

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13. Basu and Coleman, op. cit., describe the ‘Highlandist iconography’ in Scottish migrants’ last glimpse of home on boats to the USA and wonder how they kept these images in their minds in an era before photographs. 14. Lyons, G. J. and Holley, D., ‘The use of travel time by rail passengers in Great Britain’, Transportation Research, Part A, 41 (2006), pp. 107–20. 15. Urry, J., ‘Travelling times’, European Journal of Communications, 21/3 (2006), p. 368. 16. Watts, L., ‘The art and craft of train travel’, Social and Cultural Geography, 9/6 (2008), pp. 711–26. 17. Rusche, G. and Kirchheimer, O., Punishment and Social Structure (5th printing of 1939 original with introduction by Daria Melossi, Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick, 2009). 18. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books: New York, 1995), p. 28. 19. Blokhin, Iu. U., Ugolovno-ispolnitel’noe pravo: Vishee obrazovanie (Fenik: Rostov-na-Donu, 2005), p. 93. 20. Ibid., p. 94. 21. Ibid., p. 95. 22. See Zaitow, B. H. and Thomas, J. (eds), Women in Prison: Gender and Social Control (Lynne Rienner: Boulder, 2003); Crewe, B., The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009). 23. For an explanation of these concepts, see Zaitow and Thomas, op. cit. 24. Zaitow and Thomas, op. cit. 25. Irwin, J. and Owen, B., ‘Harm and the contemporary prison’, in A. Liebling and S. Maruna (eds), The Effects of Imprisonment (Sage: London, 2005), pp. 94–117. 26. Clemmer, D., The Prison Community (Rinehart: New York, 1958).

8 Staying in Touch with the World Beyond the Colony Fences I don’t know how to explain it; it’s just that you’re taken out of society and transplanted who-knows-where. I deserve it, though three years would be enough. Throughout my sentence I’ve had one foot here and the other – there. In other words, I don’t actually ‘live’ here . . . (Pr 56) I’ve noticed that I’m a completely different person here. I don’t know why. I even sometimes forget who I am precisely. I’ve even begun to forget what I was like when I was with my friends. I have a close friend on the outside and she reminds me in the letters that I was lively, that I was always sociable . . . But here I can’t laugh. When she came to visit me, a short visit, we reminisced and I had a good laugh. We chatted, and I felt close to her and a lot better, but then I had to return to this oppression. (Pr 47)

The reflections of these two prisoners, both serving five-and-a-half year sentences in a women’s colony in European Russia describe a loss of identity that surfaced in the talk of many of the women we interviewed. Their words highlight the link between their identity, space, and place. In the next three chapters we explore these relationships. We focus first on the connections women prisoners have with the outside world through their engagement with family and friends, crucial to their identity as mothers, partners, wives, and daughters. There is a large literature on the positive impact of maintaining family links in prison, much focusing on their impact on re-entry and re-offending, and we will return to this later. First, we must make a brief excursion into the literature on ‘displacement’ to provide ourselves with concepts that can help in the interpretation of the meanings embedded in women’s talk about family and home and how they felt about the ‘place’ in which they now found themselves. In refugee studies, debates about place, space, and identity have coalesced around ‘essentialist’ and ‘constructivist’ perspectives. According to the first of these, everyone has a ‘natural place’ in the world, so that uprooting them touches upon the very essence of their existence and leads to feelings of being ‘out-ofplace’. This concept draws on arguments articulated by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, who was among the early theorizers of the importance of ‘place identity’ in knowing ‘who we are’.1 Uprooting people from ‘their’ place is the source, in this view, of major psycho-pathological problems. Such essentialist perspectives are now unfashionable, not least because it is thought that globalization has created

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footloose mobile communities.2 But the objection to the essentialization of the connection between people and place in refugee studies is its implication that displaced people are powerless and lose their agency. Constructivists, on the contrary, argue that displaced people create new maps of desire and attachment. Malkii insists that to plot only ‘places of birth’ and degrees of nativeness is ‘to blind oneself to the multiplicity of attachments that people form to places through living in, remembering, and imagining them’.3 Locality or ‘place’ must be understood as a lived experience; even the displaced have to get on with the task of living their lives elsewhere—making a livelihood, surviving, and, through their actions, constructing the place where they are physically present.4 To some degree this debate parallels that in penal sociology about the agency of prisoners, but with the element of place added.5 But, just as in the debate on prison sociology, it is important not to overstate the constructivist case, since displaced people’s own images of place are often essentialized and play an important role in the strategies they develop to solve conflicts and protect livelihoods and, indeed, ‘create places’.6 Returning to the experience of women prisoners in Russia, we have seen how the process of coerced mobilization relocates them at considerable distances from where they were domiciled. Many of the women we spoke to talked of their relief at arriving at the colony, but we interpreted this as more the relief of journey’s end than of having arrived at a destination where they could put down roots. Many, rather, seemed to be describing feelings of being ‘out of place’, suspended between worlds. That being in a correctional colony should be experienced by women as a liminal space is hardly surprising: prisons are quintessential ‘troubled places’ that constitute unpromising ground for identity construction. This is expressed in the words written by two juvenile offenders in Novyi Oskol, in the ‘other comments’ section of our survey: ‘The colony is where young girls are re-educated and improved. I want to leave the colony and forget it as a dreadful nightmare’; ‘I have this feeling that everything has been taken away from me here, including air and light.’ Colonies are also often places of violence, bullying, and powerlessness, the principal markers for developing a sense of not belonging.7 In essentialist ideas about place, the prison can never be other than a temporary point in the ongoing process of coerced mobilization. Thus, in the words of one adult prisoner: No, no . . . It’s a temporary place. I’m here from necessity. I know it’s a penal institution but I tell myself – so that I don’t get depressed – that it’s a hospital, that I have to be in hospital . . . I won’t allow myself to live a colony life. I won’t be drawn into it. I don’t know why some people do . . . You can accidentally say ‘I’m home’ . . . but you try to correct yourself . . . It’s a psychological thing, not to call it that. (Pr 52)

But not everyone interviewed denied that they put down roots in the colony. Table 8.1 gives the replies of 20 young women offenders, aged 16–18, involved in an artwork project in the Novyi Oskol juvenile colony to two questions relating to their feelings about the colony. It is obvious from their responses that settling into colony life is possible without the necessity of investing in it as a ‘place’. But it was surprising how many young women were prepared to call the colony ‘home’.

Table 8.1. The responses of offenders in Novyi Oskol juvenile colony to questions about adaptation and the colony as home Prisoner details

Responses to Question I

Responses to Question 2

Age (rounded up): Length of sentence (in yrs and mths): Offence: 17 yrs 2 yrs 2 mths Theft 17 yrs 2.0 yrs Robbery 17 yrs 1 yr 10 mths Robbery 16 yrs 4 yrs 4 mths Sexual assault 17 yrs 3 yrs Theft

Have you got used to the colony or is it an alien place for you?

Has the colony become home for you?

Yes, I’ve settled in here, but when my nerves get to me, I just can’t stand being here and want to go instead to an adult colony.

I can’t really say, because sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I just can’t be here, and other times I’ve got used to it.

This place is alien to me and I never will get used to it.

No, it isn’t and never will be.

I’ve probably settled in, but still it’s unpleasant here because I know that I’m in prison and far from home.

I wouldn’t really say that it’s become home, but to some degree it’s become a substitute for home.

I’ve already got used to the colony because all the girls here are just like me.

Has the colony become home? I find it difficult to answer this question because I’ve only been here three months.

To tell the truth, I already feel a lot better but, of course without the support of parents it’s very bad.

Yes and No. It would be good to be able to call it home. You see, I only lived two years with my parents whom I only got to know two and a half years ago. Just at the moment it’s not the colony but the educators here who are my parents.

18 yrs 2 yrs Theft

Yes, I got used to it very quickly and consider this ‘my place’.

I feel like a child here because on the outside I had to live an adult life; I really like it here.

Prisoner details

Responses to Question I

Responses to Question 2

16 yrs 4 yrs 4 mths Sexual assault

The colony hasn’t become my home because the people For me it’s a nice place, there are lots of kind and warm people here, but I’ll never really like it because of the bars, the close to me and my family are not here. I can’t be confident about what’s going to happen next day and I don’t trust regime and no family. anyone.

18 yrs 8 yrs Murder 17 yrs 2 yrs 2 mths Robbery 18 yrs 3 yrs Sexual assault 17 yrs 4 yrs 6 mths Murder 17 yrs 5 yrs Murder and theft 16 yrs 2 yrs Theft 18 yrs 6 yrs Murder

Yes, I have settled into this place, but all the same it’s not quite ‘it’!

The colony has become my home, I’ve got used to this colony and it even seems to me that I have been here all my life.

To tell the truth, I have settled in because I’m the sort of person who gets used to everything.

No, it hasn’t, because I’ll never trade my home for anyone or anything.

I’ve settled in OK. To tell the truth I’ve got used to it, I have that feeling that I’ve been here for ages.

No, of course not. Because my family and friends aren’t here so it’s not comfortable.

I became involved in the collective very quickly. I settled into the colony quickly. I get on with everyone. I wouldn’t say I live badly here.

The colony has to some extent become my home, but a temporary one.

I’ve settled in; there are great girls here but the place is awful: it’s prison and we’re locked up.

No it hasn’t; it seems to me that prison can never become a home.

I’ve of course settled in, but I’ll never feel good here.

No, the colony can never be home.

Yes, of course I’ve settled in and I feel this is my place.

In my case, Yes, I’m here for a very long time and I’ve learnt a lot.

Prisoner details

Responses to Question I

Responses to Question 2

18 yrs 3 yrs 6 mths Murder and robbery 18 yrs 2 yrs 6 mths Joyriding 17 yrs 2 yrs 2mths Theft 17 years 2 yrs Sexual assault 17 yrs 5 yrs 6 mths Murder 17 yrs 9 mths Assault

I’ve settled in, but all the same freedom’s better.

No.

I’ve got used to it and feel comfortable here.

No.

It’s alien and horrid.

Temporarily.

I’ve settled in.

No.

This place is alien and horrid.

No.

I’ve settled in, but all the same it’s not comfortable.

No.

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Some had spent their childhood in state institutions and, presumably, were already adept at constructing the place where they were physically present as ‘home’. In other cases, it may reflect relief from a chaotic lifestyle or the construction of the colony as a place of redemption, much as in the film Devochka that we described in the introductory chapter. Stephanie Taylor has observed that ‘truth’ is unimportant when it comes to using places as a narrative resource to tell one’s life story, so the fact that many female prisoners come from chaotic and abusive homes does not detract from the power of the ‘home myth’ when contrasting where they now are with where they were before. The relevance to the point we are making here is that since prison is necessarily a troubled place, the women inhabiting it must, indeed, be prone to feelings of not belonging. We believe that this feeling, which is no doubt common to all prisons, is exacerbated by the double isolation suffered by women in the Russian penal system and adds to the pains of imprisonment. This is despite the attempts of the prison authorities to encourage them to identify with their colonies by promoting inter-colony sports and talent competitions or, in the case of juvenile colonies, teaching their charges all about the region in which the colony is located. In the L’govo juvenile colony, this took the form of wall posters about the famous people and places in ‘our region’. The girls were able to recite to us the main tourist sites in Riazan’ and the biography of local poet Sergei Yesenin, even though from the vantage point of the colony classroom all they could see of the region was some treetops.8 This would seem to be of a piece with attempts to promote ‘detachment loyalty’ through competitions within the colony. We discuss these in Chapter 12. A strong theme in the responses to our questions from the girls in Novyi Oskol colony is the equation of home with family. One element of women prisoners’ identity construction where place is implicated is the changes that incarceration brings in the performance of their role as a member of a family: as daughter, partner, wife and/or, crucially, mother, which in turn is affected by the quality of the contacts they are able to maintain with the outside world. It is to this we now turn.

Staying in touch: some general principles There is a consensus among penal sociologists that maintaining family contacts is a factor in the successful rehabilitation of offenders and the reduction of rates of recidivism; if they are able to feel that they are still valued family members and are able to take part in family decision-making, prisoners are motivated to remain out of prison in the future. Holt and Miller’s study of 1971 which identified family relationships as one of the four most influential factors in successful re-entry has been confirmed by subsequent studies.9 Much of this research concerns male prisoners, although there are some exceptions, and they have led to the development in the West of family programmes in prisons, including marital workshops, family education, and parenting classes.10 Women figure more prominently in research on

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the impact of the ‘family process variable’ on adaptation, where it is agreed that separation and loss, and the wrench of restricted contact with family, in the context of often fragile relationships, are a risk inducer to self-harm and suicide.11 Women, it is argued, suffer more than men from loss of family ties since their sense of self-worth and morality is embedded in social relationships.12 It would appear to follow naturally from this that maintaining family links when in prison will have a therapeutic affect on women, calming them down, helping them to adjust to the prison regime, and motivating them to keep out of trouble. There are some dissenting voices: Lindquist found that, rather than promoting mental wellbeing, social relationships are associated with higher levels of distress, which suggests that social integration may play a different role for people who are incarcerated compared with society at large.13 This is not to say, though, that separation from family is not a major deprivation factor or that this is not felt most intensely by women.14 It suggests, rather, that incarceration is best reserved for offenders who are a genuine threat to public safety. Meanwhile, the focus in feminist research on the unique needs of women prisoners derived from their personal histories, according to Liebling, has led to an underestimation of the role of the prison environment in how women experience the pains of deprivation.15 Our research confirms the importance of the prison environment insofar as one element of this is the extreme distances that have to be bridged if any communication and contact, vital to relationship maintenance, is to be achieved. In signing up to international conventions on the humane treatment of prisoners, the Russian Federation has committed itself to taking seriously the rights of prisoners to a family life. It had a lot of ground to make up since the Soviet penal system had placed greater value on the power of labour than the family to ease re-socialization; hence the development of a penal infrastructure that reflected the distribution of the country’s resources and construction sites, rather than one that reflected the distribution of population. During the late Soviet period, prisoners had certain rights of correspondence and visitation, but these were severely limited and arbitrary.16 The post-1991 reform of the criminal correction code for the first time laid out improved prisoners’ visitation and other communication rights, although their realization depended upon context. For example, the provision of the right to unlimited telephone conversations presupposes the existence of functioning telephones; the receipt of parcels, people who can afford to send them; and visitation, relatives and friends with the time, financial, and health resources to travel to the colonies. The comment of one former prisoner, when we asked why she did not telephone her family, hints at the general problems in taking up the new rights: Talk on the phone? . . . Well, let’s calculate it. There were eleven detachments, right? And we’re allowed to phone between 4.30 and 9 p.m. so that’s four and a half hours; 120 women per detachment divided by four; four because some don’t get through. So that’s 30, so that gives us two to three minutes, right? Every eleven days. Yes, because of the number of detachments. And that’s assuming nothing’s broken and, as a matter of fact, the phone was

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always faulty. I can’t remember ever having a phone call when something didn’t go wrong.17

Penal scholarship in Russia has embraced the arguments about the relationship between successful re-socialization and the maintenance of prisoners’ ‘socially useful contacts’. In the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the late architect of penal reform, A. S. Mikhlin, argued that keeping in contact with families was a major factor in the process of ‘re-education and social re-adaptation’ as well as being important to the ‘moral and financial support’ of prisoners during incarceration.18 The latter point was especially important in the 1990s, when outside contacts were crucial to the physical well-being of prisoners as economic crisis meant that colonies had difficulty providing them with food and medicines. Having relatives who were prepared to send food parcels was, literally, a matter of life or death for prisoners in some colonies.19 Today, conditions have improved but the receipt of parcels is still important to prisoners, providing them with sanitary and beauty products, food, magazines, and books. Parcels also play a crucial role in social relationships between prisoners, as we shall see in Chapter 10. Russian penologists continue to press the case for more effort to be put into encouraging the family ties of Russian prisoners. Recent research has shown that the ‘negative collective mood’ that underpins the violence of gang culture in men’s colonies is a consequence of prison traditions and customs, lack of communication with family and friends, distress related to physical isolation and also ‘such circumstances as the location of the colony’.20 Unable to plan for a future involving family, it is argued, prisoners develop ‘a narrowly selfish outlook’ and lack motivation to regulate their behaviour. Attention has been drawn to other negative consequences of the disruption of family ties, such as, for example, the development of abusive homosexual relationships and the development of disinhibition, apathy, and aggression in the penal environment.21 These findings about the negative impacts of distance and isolation on the ability of prisoners to maintain family relationships are almost entirely based upon the experiences of male prisoners. There is a small literature in Russia that, although not engaging with questions about the gendered nature of penal regimes, has questioned the strong ‘family imperative’ in much of the indigenous penological literature, focusing on its failure to address the problem of the violence and abuse in the family environment. Research in Russia on domestic violence is in its infancy, however, hampered by underreporting, societal attitudes, and the lack of recognition of it as a distinctive form of violent crime in the criminal code.22

Patterns of contact in Russia’s women’s penal colonies Current provisions for external contacts are broadly similar for women and men in standard regime colonies, but with some important exceptions that are supposed to reflect women’s needs. The number of parcels women are entitled to receive, for

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example, is unlimited, whereas there are limits on the number that men can receive; women prisoners can apply for a fifteen-day furlough to settle a child with care-givers or to visit an invalid child; and there are a host of privileges that apply to women who have their children with them. In their failure to acknowledge fathers’ parental rights, these extra privileges reflect society’s belief in the ‘maternal imperative’, although the provision for parcels appears to be informed by a more generalized understanding of women’s special needs, for example for sanitary and beauty products. The uptake of furloughs is extremely limited: 18.6 per cent of women prisoners applied for discretionary leave in 2009, but only 0.3 per cent of women were given it—the same figure as for men (who are entitled to seven days, principally for family bereavement).23 And where the right to unlimited parcels is concerned, this liberal entitlement has not impacted significantly on the number that women actually receive.24 In Tables 8.2 and 8.3 we summarize the results contained in the 2009 FSIN census for the number of parcels that adult women and men prisoners received and telephone calls they made during the census year, and similar statistics for the sample of young offenders from our own survey in Novyi Oskol in 2010. The salient features of the statistics are that there has been an upward trend in the inter-census period; that despite an improved frequency of telephone use this still remains surprisingly underutilized in Russian prisons; and that, judged by these criteria, both adult and juvenile women prisoners are better connected with the outside world than men.25 The story with visitation (Table 8.4) is different. Russian correctional colonies allow for two types of visits: short and long. Short visits can last for up to four hours; and long, co-residential visits for three days. The latter are confined to close family members, and common-law partners are only permitted with the permission of the colony head. Entitlement to these visits varies according to sentence Table 8.2. The external connections of convicted prisoners: telephone calls Number of telephone Adult women Adult men Juvenile women calls made in past (% of population sample) (% of population sample) in Novyi Oskol 12 mths VK

1 2 3 4 >4 0 Total

1999

2009

2009

2010

7.9 3.5 1.9 0.8 0.8 85.1 100.0

7.1 6.2 5.7 6.1 48.9 26.0 100.0

5.1 5.0 4.1 4.2 24.7 56.9 100.0

0 11.5 3.8 3.8 61.7 19.2 100.0

Sources: Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), p. 54; and our own survey of Novyi Oskol The 2009 figures relate to 1 in 2 of the women and 1 in 10 of the men serving prison sentences on 12–18 November 2009.

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Table 8.3. The external connections of convicted prisoners: parcels Number of parcels received in the previous 12 mths

Adult women Adult men Juveniles in (% of population sample) (% of population sample) Novyi Oskol VK

1–3 4–6 7–9 >9 None Average number None in 1999

2009

2009

2010

30.9 16.4 7.8 11.8 33.1 3.9 43.7

62.9 16.2 1.8 1.3 18.4 2.2 30.4

30.8 15.4 0.0 19.2 34.6 5.0 n/d

Sources: Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), p. 51; and our own survey of Novyi Oskol. The 2009 figures relate to 1 in 2 of the women and 1 in 10 of the men serving prison sentences on 12–18 November 2009.

Table 8.4. The external connections of convicted prisoners: visits Number of visits in year of census

Adult women Adult men Juveniles in (% of population sample) (% of population sample) Novyi Oskol VK 2009 Short

2009 Long

Short

(residential) 1–3 4–6 7–9 > 10 None Average number None in 1999

28.1 71.0 0.8 0.4 63.3 0.9 71.7

23.9 2.2 0.2 73.7 0.5 79.2

2010 Long

(residential) 41.8 4.5 0.5 0.2 53.0 1.0 49.4

34.1 3.5 0.3 62.1 0.8 71.1

Both short and long 3.8 3.8 0.0 0.0 92.4 0.08 n/d

Sources: Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), p. 53; and our own survey of Novyi Oskol. The 2009 figures relate to 1 in 2 of the women and 1 in 10 of the men serving prison sentences on 12–18 November 2009.

and regime conditions, but the majority of women are entitled to six short and four long visits per annum. The statistics on visitation show that both adult and juvenile women receive fewer visits than men, although this is against a background of generally low visitation rates for all groups. Contacts with the outside world by phone and post are seldom translated into visits, however, and this is more marked in the case of women than men, and of juveniles compared with adults. The results of our questionnaire survey of two women’s penal colonies in Mordoviia are not directly comparable with the census data, but they confirm the same inverse

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relationship between the different forms of communication. Only a small number of women in our survey had no contact of any sort with the outside world; these were bomzhi (the homeless) and women who had broken contact with their families before arrest or been rejected post-imprisonment. In our sample, 41 per cent of a population of 144 respondents had received one or more visits since they were first incarcerated. We calculated the relationship between the actual visits against the number to which women were entitled for this group.26 The results paint a dismal picture of visitation: a miniscule 3.4 per cent of the entitlement to short visits and 11.6 per cent of long visits had been taken up by our sample.27 Setting the total number of visits recorded in our survey (159 short, 184 long) against the total number of years served by the women up to the point of our survey (393 years 6 months), it was possible to determine that the average annual number of short visits for the visited women is 0.4, and of long visits 0.5. It is obvious that visitation is not part of the routine for women prisoners in Russia. Who visits women in Russia’s penal colonies holds no surprises: according to our questionnaire survey, and confirmed by the interviews with personnel and prisoners, the majority of visits women receive are from their parents (63.1 per cent), mainly mothers; followed by other relatives—siblings, grandparents, children— and friends (25.6 per cent); and, finally, husbands and partners (12.3 per cent). There is a small minority of women who received visits from more than one family member (eight from a total population surveyed of 144), which happened most often when young children were included in a visit. Husbands and partners had a poor showing—fewer than 14 per cent of women who had a partner or husband before imprisonment had been visited by him. We allocated women who reported a visit into groups according to the frequency of visitation (see Appendix 3). As might be expected, a higher percentage (40 per cent) of the most visited women (that is, with more than one visit a year) were in the first two years of their sentence, compared with 20 per cent who had been incarcerated for more than two years. These findings are consistent with other studies of Russian prisoners, showing family connections falling off the deeper into a sentence the women are.28

‘I tell her not to come’: visitation in women’s correctional colonies There are a variety of possible explanations for why contact by post and telephone does not translate into a pattern of regular visitation for women in Russian correctional colonies. First, the duration of sentences, which have been increasing in the past decade, may be a contributory factor. Secondly, it may reflect the fact that the women’s closest relatives are in prison. Thirdly, there is geography, the explanation with which we are most concerned in this book. Before we discuss how distance impacts on visitation, a word of caution is necessary. It would seem common sense to suppose that incarcerating women in remote locations must make visitation difficult, but it needs to be borne in mind that distance is a ‘duplicitous

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variable’ that is just as capable of assuming a dependent as an independent role in women’s talk about visits. Distance may well prevent a visit but it can also be used as an ‘excuse’ for a visit that never gets to the planning stage, or it may exist only in the imagination. Furthermore, the distance that women prisoners and their relatives are grappling with is not its Euclidean variety but rather is subjective, mediated by physical capabilities, financial and time budgets, predispositions and perceptions. For both prisoners and their relatives the distances separating them can ‘stretch’ and ‘contract’. In Russia, when talking about distance people typically refer to length of journey times, so it came as no surprise that when we asked women about how far their relatives had to come to visit them, they would normally reply in days or hours. Many relatives of the girls incarcerated in L’govo and Novyi Oskol juvenile girls’ colonies typically had week-long round journeys to these colonies. The parents of one of our interview partners, for example, would have to travel from their small town of Shumbai to Ufa, capital of the Republic of Bashkiriia, a two-hour journey by electric train, and from there by another train to Riazan’, and then transfer to a bus for the final leg of the journey to L’govo. When she was in the remand prison in Ufa this prisoner’s mother had visited her frequently, but in the two years that she had been in L’govo her mother had only been able to make the journey once. Relatives and friends of prisoners have to rely on informal channels, such as NGO-run internet sites, in order to find out how to access colonies, but still journeys can be arduous and hazardous.29 We were told one story by a prisoner from St Petersburg about a co-prisoner’s mother who died en route to visit her. Our angry interlocutor asked: Why is it that men can serve their sentences near home but for us women there’s nothing of the sort – it’s off to Mordoviia, Cheliabinsk, Tsibilinsk, Alatyr’, or Koslovka. We have no women’s colony in St Petersburg. You’d think they would be able to build just one. In Samara they have a women’s zone, in Cheliabinsk they have their zone, in Chuvashiia even. But we don’t have one. So parents have to travel and if they die . . . After this incident I told my mother not to come but she missed me and so came. I didn’t sleep all night before, and I prayed to God that nothing happened to her; I only relaxed when I saw that she’d arrived. (Pr 10)

Self-denial with respect to visits from relatives was a common thread in conversations with both the juvenile and adult women prisoners. One juvenile offender in L’govo who came from Arkhangel’sk oblast in the European north who received visits from her mother and aunt whilst on remand—‘because it wasn’t far for them’—urged her mother not to visit her in L’govo and to spend the money on parcels instead: Mum wanted to visit but I didn’t want her to come; in any case she wouldn’t be able to come very often because she has to work. I said to her that it would be better to send me parcels than come here, because it’s very expensive. (JP 6)

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Similarly, one former prisoner told her mother not to visit in order to save money: ‘Mum,’ I say, ‘don’t come to see me, don’t come.’ I tell her it’s better to send a parcel instead. You see, she just was spending so much money on coming . . . It was better to send a parcel. So, instead, we spoke on the phone once a week on my day off – that way you didn’t have time to start missing them. (Pr 7)

The costs of travel to colonies can, indeed, be prohibitive, but there is not only the fare to consider. Most women’s colonies have rooms set aside for long visits where relatives can live together with the prisoner for the three days they are there. The cost of renting one of these varies, but typically the cost is equivalent to a cheap hotel—beyond the resources of many prisoners and their families. On top of this expense, visitors also have to pay for provisions—food and drink—for the duration of the visit and for other goods requested by the prisoner. The total cost of a visit to an out-of-region colony can, therefore, run into several thousands of rubles. One visitor calculated that the round trip from Moscow to a colony in Dagestan in 2005 cost her twice the then average monthly wage.30 There are other obstacles to be overcome for a successful visit. Since the complex journeys involved mean that arrival times are difficult to predict, there may not be a room available for the desired dates. Some visitors turn up at colonies on the offchance there will be a room available without booking in advance. The evidence is that colonies usually try to accommodate unscheduled visits, but when this happens they provide an opportunity to remind all concerned of their dependent status: [W]hen I was in IK2 my brother came to visit me. It was a complete surprise, my youngest brother, he was in the army. I am sitting at my machine sewing and they call me out. ‘Liliia, you’ve a parcel.’ I say, ‘That can’t be right, nobody comes to see me.’ Then they said something about them not being liars. Well, I go but I’m thinking all the time that it’s a practical joke. I so don’t believe it. I go to the parcel window. And she [the officer] starts shouting at me, ‘Why didn’t you apply for a meeting?’ And I say, ‘Who?’ She says, ‘Your brother’s come to see you.’ I say, ‘Well, I had no idea he was coming. He’s in the army.’ That’s like a prison also but, as they say, with gaps in the fences. And they said, ‘Well he’s been here since 9 this morning standing out there in the frost, waiting. You’re a one!’ Well, how was I to know? I never expected a visit. (Pr 11)

The visitation statistics show that the obstacles ‘defeat’ most relatives. It is apparent in the talk of the women interviewed that it was important to them that we did not interpret failure to visit as evidence of rejection by family and friends. They were insistent of their ownership of decisions about visitation and careful in their justifications for visits not made, even though a lack of conviction in their own explanations sometimes breaks through. Here is one former prisoner explaining why her mother didn’t visit: INTERVIEWEE: No, it didn’t work out for me to have a residential visit, because my mother lived in the countryside in our house and she kept a cow. She’d have to have found someone to milk it. INTERVIEWER: So there was no one to bring your children?

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INTERVIEWEE: No. INTERVIEWER: And she couldn’t have found someone to look after the cow? INTERVIEWEE: That’s right. But, really, she didn’t want to come. I would have had to tell her what to bring for a long visit: something to cook, because on long visits you have to feed yourself, you can’t go to the zone shop. In that visitors’ room you have to ‘fry and boil’, as they say. And you need enough for three days. The zone doesn’t feed you. You’d have to bring enough food for everyone. And she just didn’t want to do this. And why should I burden her with this? (Ex-Pr 8)

For another prisoner, serving an eight-year sentence in Mordoviia, the important issue was to explain a fall-off in visits: Of course I have visits. Mum hasn’t come recently, it’s too far and she’s already 54. She did come before, often. Also we do have a phone we can use. I spoke with my parents, literally yesterday. And we write to each other often. The last time they visited was four years ago, but now they can’t come . . . In principle, they earn enough to afford it. But all the same it’s a long way for my mother, she’s not that young. Anyway I think I can live without it. (Pr 33)

With another, poor health is the explanation given: INTERVIEWEE: I told her that she should not come often. She’s an invalid. She has a bad heart, she’d had a heart attack. The road is long and it’s difficult. INTERVIEWER: Ulianovsk isn’t that far from here. INTERVIEWEE: If you go by car it’s five or six hours. And by train it’s longer. She’d have to do it alone. (Pr 18)

Finally, the relative cost of travel set against the cost of childcare surfaced as an explanation: INTERVIEWEE: They’ve started to come less frequently now. They have to look after and feed my two children and so they have to save. In other words, there’s a material problem. INTERVIEWER: That means you’ve not seen them for some time? INTERVIEWEE: Yes, they came last in 2005 [three years previously]. But I’ve explained to you that they have to save to be able to feed the children. And to get the train to come and see me is a waste of money. (Pr 14)

Admissions of regret, like this below from a juvenile prisoner who had not seen her parents since her arrest, were an exception: Of course I want them to visit. You can go on living but, of course, in your heart of hearts you wish they would visit, just to see them. I’ve come to terms with it, I get letters and they phone. (Juvenile Prisoner, Novyi Oskol, 2010)

These words convey some sense of the pain of separation that the women experience. Whilst distance, and its surrogates, cost and time, figure strongly in the women’s narratives, it is obvious that it is rarely the ‘whole story’ behind low

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frequency of visitations; human relationships are too complex for whether a visit takes place to be reduced to a single causal factor, and there are societal attitudes towards women’s criminality that need to be factored into any explanation as well. One ex-prisoner summed it up: Some parents don’t come because they have to stay with a kid, their grandson or granddaughter; they have to feed that grandson or granddaughter and they don’t see any need to take them to the colony because it’s already a dog’s breakfast: the daughter’s in jail, the baby’s left with the parents, who needs to go on a visit as well? (Ex-Pr 2)

The annual visit can become weighted with significance and heightened emotion as all parties are forced to re-enact the pain of the initial separation. Some women commented on the intensity of the visits and the ‘stupor’ they produced that could last for days and even weeks. Their infrequency means that for prisoners and their families visits cannot become routinized. This interview partner who was serving a second carceral sentence was able to compare the difference between being held in a near and distant colony: I did my first sentence in Tomsk, and used to have frequent visits, like every three months. But home’s a long way from here: a three-day round trip. My family are just not able to do this for every visit I’m entitled to. I can’t handle them coming and leaving, unless it’s often. I’m used to being here now – it’s a habit and it’s easier that way. I think that if they came, I’d just find it more difficult. (Ex-Pr 13)

A little corner of domesticity Visiting rooms in colonies are a space in which prisoners can (re)connect with the world beyond the prison gate and, for a while, recover their former identities. The visiting suites in Russian penal colonies become sites of performance where women act out a variety of roles associated with life on the outside. Where short visits are concerned, physical arrangements varied for the prisoners interviewed: there were those who complained of semi-opaque perspex, faulty intercom systems, and cramped conditions; and those who, at the other end of the spectrum, described café-like layouts where prisoners and their families sat at coffee tables and could order beverages. Similarly, the colony ‘hotels’ used for long-term visits are varied. These are isolated from the living zone of the colony, sometimes in the administration block, and normally they consist of a number of bedrooms off a common corridor with a shared kitchen and bathroom and, occasionally, a separate common room, which allows for the mixing at any one time of up to half a dozen prisoners and their families.31 Prisoners are allocated a room where they reside with their visitors(s) for three days; they self-cater and are not allowed out, for example, to the prison shop. This means that the provisions the visitors bring must be sufficient for the whole period. Everything brought in has to be cleared on inspection, and there are forbidden items such as opened packages, alcohol, and

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money. However, compared with USA penitentiaries, a surprising range of goods are allowed in.32 Some visitors reporting their experiences on self-help websites write of cold, vermin, and filth in visitor suites; but the newly refurbished colony hotel we visited in IK2 in Mordoviia resembled typical hostel accommodation, with a vase of plastic flowers, wall hangings, TV, and easy chairs, but no windows or access to a courtyard. For the duration of the visit prisoners are permitted to dispense with their uniform; they are relieved from work and from attending morning and evening roll call. Instead of the latter, the officer in charge confirms prisoners’ presence twice daily. Apart from these checks, they are normally left alone. Visitor suites therefore constitute small islands of domesticity where women prisoners can live a family life for three days. One prisoner, a pensioner in her 60s, in prison for a second time, describes a typical scene in the visitor suite in IK2, Mordoviia, when her daughters visit: What do we do? Well, firstly, we chatter round the clock; then we spend lots of time in the kitchen. The children want to feed me with home cooking. We spend half our time in the kitchen. We have very good food in the colony but you want something special. By the way, they feed us better here than in the army, and that’s the truth . . . If there are no men visiting we stay in our pyjamas; so for visits I always grab my pyjamas and dressing gown. Men never come on long visits . . . I always say not to bring any clothes for me, I just come with a bag, a dressing gown, pyjamas, slippers, and empty containers for food. (Pr 19)

Although the likelihood of getting divorced or married for incarcerated women is undoubtedly with the former, it is not unknown for women to marry when in prison. One of our respondents described her path to matrimony: We knew each other in N. before I was arrested. When he heard that I was in prison he wrote to me . . . and then he suddenly came to see me [on a short visit] that first time. And then, well, perhaps I, well, I don’t know, maybe I was feeling homesick, we got married and we had a baby. (Pr 58)

In Mordoviia, colony weddings always deserve a full-length feature in the inhouse newspaper, but they are more common in men’s than women’s colonies. Nevertheless, the Deputy Governor of IK2 recalled five marriages during her fifteen years in the colony, and they can be followed by an immediate honeymoon in the visitors’ suite. Prison officers explained that marriages are normally permitted only with existing partners in order to protect women from ‘predatory men’. We were further informed that, when they did take place, marriages were primarily motivated by the desire of a couple to qualify for a conjugal visit which, for some of our officer informants, was, in turn, motivated by women’s intention of getting pregnant in order to qualify for the benefits that go with motherhood in the colony. The combination of the active encouragement of the domestic ideal in the visitors’ suites with stereotypical views of women prisoners’ motivations is an example of the confusions and contradictions we found among penal agents about women prisoners’ gender identities.

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Growing apart Literature on women’s imprisonment in other countries argues that family breakdown is a consequence of the incarceration of women in distant places. Among the prison personnel, the majority view was that it is a severe problem, as expressed by one correctional officer we interviewed: Of course it’s negative . . . Because of it [distance], the social connections of families can be destroyed as not everyone can visit. For women, these connections are a big encouragement. I see how women fret, they wait for letters and when there is a long time with no letters and no one comes to visit, they fret. It’s so difficult, so difficult.

But not everyone agrees. The Deputy Governor of IK2 in Mordoviia maintained that the effect of distance was exaggerated, and insisted that prisoners could, in any case, keep in contact by phone and letters. But this was an unusual view. Our materials do not allow us to determine when the rift between prisoner and other family members or friends is most likely to take place. With married prisoners, divorce is a sign of irretrievable breakdown. According to the 2009 census, 10.7 per cent of women serving sentences had been divorced subsequent to incarceration, as against 15.1 per cent who remained married, and 74.2 per cent who were unmarried.33 In our survey in two colonies in Mordoviia, 17 per cent of respondents reported their marital status as divorced, and of these 20 per cent (five out of a total of 25) had still been co-habiting with their husband prior to arrest. The most common reasons for relationship breakdown we were given was the unwillingness of partners to wait. This former prisoner’s story was typical: When I was taken into custody, he came to the prison. ‘I’ll wait for you: I’ll come and visit you,’ and so on. That was the last time I saw him. Now, my Mum’s seen him. It seems he has a new woman and a baby. I don’t know whether that’s true. But I don’t want to find him. We didn’t really have a proper relationship then, so it’s even less likely now. (Ex-Pr 1)

Prison can give women time to reflect on unsatisfactory or abusive relationships, leading them to take action to end them: INTERVIEWEE: My Mum was our son’s guardian and at first his father visited but then he disappeared, and for a whole year he didn’t re-appear. Then we found out . . . that he was in prison. He was given eleven years, he’ll be released when our son’s already sixteen; he’s ten now. INTERVIEWER: Do you write to your husband now? INTERVIEWEE: No! Straight away, when he was sent to jail I thought ‘no’ this is not the same man, he’s not worth it! It’s true he came to see me . . . I said to him go and live your life, only don’t abandon the kid, ‘help him’. I said you’re still a young man, I have no claims on you. Then he abandoned our child, and so I abandoned him. (Ex-Pr 13)

Where other family members are concerned, there are no obvious objective measures, like divorce, of the status of the relationship. Instead, we must rely on the

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women’s talk, bearing in mind that their stories reflect understandings and expectations that are not necessarily shared by the people they are talking about. Growing apart from family can be difficult for prisoners to admit, but some did volunteer observations about feelings of loss and abandonment when they were asked what they found most difficult about being incarcerated: It’s the loss of the people dear to you. The loss of your loved ones, when loved ones for some reason or other stop writing or phoning. When your family isn’t in contact, it’s very difficult. I was terrified about it after the court. That’s the worse thing that can happen here – to lose your loved ones. I’ve seen lots of women who have lost contact with their mothers, children, and other relatives and they all suffer so, and we all suffer when we see this happening, even though they are complete strangers to us. Yes, it’s terrible, loss of loved ones. (Pr 43)

The statistics we gave earlier, showing that relatively high percentages of women prisoners maintain some form of contact short of visits with people outside prison, can mask complicated patterns of connection and disconnection. Women expressed a mixture of anger, hurt, and guilt when their rejection by a loved one surfaced in their talk, as the following two examples show. The first is from a woman serving a ten-year sentence in Mordoviia, and the second is a former prisoner looking back to her period on remand when her parents could have visited: As soon as I was sent down my older sister went silent, and not just her, it was the whole family. It was as if the whole clan had left for another planet. I’d order a telephone conversation but she was never home. And then one day I got Maxim and it turns out that my sister was at home. But she spoke to me, without any explanation, in a really cold voice. She says, ‘I can’t get the children to write, and I don’t have time.’ But that’s not a reason for staying so completely silent, is it? I am guilty, I admit that, but I’ve never blamed anyone else. What happened, happened. I don’t know, would it be better for them if I did away with myself here? . . . I think she’s betrayed me. (Pr 36) Dad and my brother came to the court . . . not on a visit – they came to hear the sentence. Well, I asked where Mum was. But Dad has bad hearing – he was a miner all his life. I ask him again where’s Mum. He just points to his back to indicate she has trouble with her back . . . where it hurts. So I say, ‘Are you sure it’s not a sore throat?’ That was all we said. For some reason, I was really offended that she hadn’t come to hear the sentence. I knew that I was going to be taken away for a long time and that I won’t see her again soon. (Ex-Pr 4)

In other cases, the loosening of family ties, which seemed to be inevitable with prisoners on long sentences, was more gradual and resulted from the renegotiation by prisoners of their significant social relationships in the context of the prison. The following extract is from a 40-year-old woman serving a 20-year sentence: The first five years I was inside, in my mind I was still free but [later] I began to lose that idea and to forget. Even when my mother came to visit. . .I began to understand that she had moved ahead in her life, and that I had fallen behind. [She had become] this 60-year-old person, whilst I am stuck in some stone age. (Pr 55)

Over the years, she said, her relatives had been replaced by women she had come to know in the colony, some of whom visited her after they were released. She no

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longer exchanges letters with her parents, son, and friends who wrote to her in the first years.

Mother, place, redemption The prisoner whom we met earlier in this chapter, who married an old friend and conceived their child on a conjugal visit, described to us her imaginings about the day she will be released: Every evening I sit and I think all about that meeting, what it will be like, how I will ring the door bell. We have a railway station [in the town] opposite our house and I go straight there without a sideways glance. That is, I have this dream of walking straight home. (Pr 58)

The meeting she fantasizes about is not with her new husband but with her mother. Her fantasy is not unusual either for women prisoners in Russia or elsewhere. Many prisoners spoke about their yearning to see ‘my mother and my home’ and how these are constantly in their thoughts. The return to the parental home and, in particular, to their mother is one of the normative narratives that women prisoners in Russian penal colonies draw upon in constructing their life stories and projecting them forward. There are other narrative resources at hand, but what we might term the ‘return of the prodigal daughter’ narrative is dominant. The parental home serves two roles in the narrative: it is simultaneously a site of childhood memories, associated with nurturing, security, and happiness, and a site of forgiveness, redemption, and renewal; but it is also closely implicated with the gender and sexual identities associated with family, positioning women as daughters, wives, mothers, and homemakers.34 The idea of the redemptive power of the parental home is encouraged by prison personnel. In the juvenile colony in L’govo, the chief psychologist explained that the purpose of the colony’s rehabilitative efforts was to bring the girls ‘to an understanding of their guilt before their parents and the motherland’, hence the policy to return girls to their parents. It is not surprising, therefore, that shame and guilt about the effect of their actions on their mother—her health, peace of mind, happiness—often figured in both the young and adult women’s talk. Many described what amounts to an epiphany after some time in the colony: about the pain they have caused their mother and their determination to put things right as soon as they are released. Thus, in answer to a question about whom they most admire in the world, and what place, if they won the lottery, they would choose to go after release, an overwhelming majority of the young women interviewed in the L’govo colony answered ‘Mother’ to the first and ‘Home’ to the second, including those who had long since been abandoned by the former and had never had the latter. A majority (80.1 per cent) of respondents to the questionnaire survey we conducted in L’govo said they were intending to go to the parental home on release, and just under onethird that they would be met at the colony by a parent (although we were told that, in reality, the majority make their way alone). In the survey of adult prisoners in

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Mordoviia, 43 per cent of respondents stated their intention of heading to the parental home on release—just half of whom had been living with their parents at the time of their arrest. Our interest in the ‘prodigal daughter’ narrative is that it is linked to place, and as such constitutes evidence that ‘rooted belonging’ retains a relevance for women prisoners’ identity construction. Women often used ‘home’, ‘native region’ (rodina, somewhat akin to Heimat), and ‘mother’ interchangeably, and their descriptions of their native town, village, or region were invariably positive, referring to ‘beautiful nature’, forests, and ‘clean air’, or in urban environments to status attributes, such as large supermarkets, high rise apartment blocks, cinemas and theatres, airports and public squares with flowers. These are the stereotypical attributes of good places in Russia. Adult and juvenile prisoners explained how they liked discussing their home town and region with other prisoners with everyone trying ‘to show off her home town in the best light’. Attachment to place is expressed in women’s attempts to keep up with general news and events from their home region, which they do by asking relatives to send magazines and newspapers or by direct subscription. Watching television is a popular leisure activity for women in colonies, but it can reinforce feelings of detachment and distance because of the regionalization of broadcasting: this means that, apart from national news, it is dominated by local events, and in the national republics is in the local language. As we saw in the previous chapter, being transported out of their home regions to an unfamiliar place is in some ways analogous to being incarcerated in a foreign country; and this feeling of foreignness is exacerbated by the fact that lines of communication with ‘home’ are stretched over long distances. Returning to a theme with which we began this chapter, we argue that separation from a particular place is a negative experience for prisoners. The social relationships that are severed when women are incarcerated are ‘emplaced relationships’, so that when they are imprisoned they experience displacement and the feeling of being ‘out of place’. This is made all the worse by the distances they are transported. In prisoners’ imaginary geographies, the region in which their colony is located is compared unfavourably with their home region, and in this way the troubled place that is the prison spills over to a wider area. One decision that many women prisoners have to make is whether they want to bring their children into this place. We discuss the attitudes and practices connected with motherhood in Russian prisons in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Tuan, Yi-Fu, ‘Rootedness versus sense of place’, Landscape, 25 (1980), pp. 3–8. 2. For the ‘footloose argument’, see Giddens, A., Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Polity: Cambridge, 1991); Massey, D., ‘A globalised sense of place’, Marxism Today (June 1991), pp. 24–9.

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3. Malkii, L., ‘National Geographic: the rooting of peoples and the territorialization of national identity among scholars and refugees’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds), Culture, Power, Place. Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 1997), p. 72. 4. For example, Brun, C., ‘Reterritorializing the relationship between people and place in refugee studies’, Geografisker Annaler, 83 B (2001), p. 19. 5. For a discussion of the issues around prisoner agency, see Bosworth, M. and Carrabine, E., ‘Reassessing resistance: race, gender and sexuality in prison’, Punishment & Society, 3/4 (2001), pp. 501–15; Bosworth, M., Prisons (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008). 6. Brun, op. cit., p. 23. 7. Taylor, S., Narratives of Identity and Place (Routledge: London, 2010). 8. Adult colonies also hold lectures on the local region, and the colony libraries that we visited had sections devoted to local history and geography. 9. The other three are the individual character of the offender, the community context, and state policy; see Holt, N. and Miller, D. H., Explorations in Inmate–Family Relationships (California State Department of Corrections: Sacramento, 1971); see also Visher, C. A. and Travis, J., ‘Transitions from prison to community’, Annual Review of Sociology, 29 (2003), pp. 89–113. 10. Dowde, C. and Andrews, D. A., ‘What works with women offenders. A meta-analytic review’, Crime and Delinquency, 45/4 (1999), pp. 438–52. 11. Liebling. A., ‘Suicide among women prisoners’, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 33/1 (1994), pp. 1–9; Liebling, A., Duries, L., Stiles, A., and Tait, T., ‘Revisiting prison suicide: the role of fairness and distress’, in A. Liebling and S. Maruna (eds), The Effects of Imprisonment (Willan: Cullompton, 2005); Kruttschnitt, C. and Vuolo, M., ‘The cultural context of women prisoners’ mental health: a comparison of two prison systems’, Punishment & Society, 9/2 (2007), pp. 115–56; Loucks, N., ‘Women in prison’, in J. R. Adler and J. M. Gray (eds), Forensic Psychology: Concepts, Debates and Practice (Willan: Abingdon, 2010), pp. 479–80. 12. Kruttschnitt, C., ‘The politics of confinement: women’s imprisonment in California and the UK’, in Liebling and Maruna, op. cit., p. 162. 13. Lindquist, C. H., ‘Social integration and inmate well-being in jail’, Sociological Forum, 15/3 (2000), pp. 431–55. 14. Although see Jiang, S. and Winfree, Jr, L. T., ‘Social support, gender and inmate adjustment to prison life: insights from a national sample’, Prison Journal, 86/1 (2006), pp. 32–55, who observe that women get more social support than men in prison. 15. Liebling A., ‘Doing research in prison: breaking the silence’, Theoretical Criminology, 3/2 (1999), p. 165. 16. It was only two decades ago that the Russian penal service was able to report ‘positive results’ from an experiment allowing women prisoners to make intercity phone calls to family. For the changes in the early 1990s, see Mikhlin, A. S., ‘Eksperiment v zhenskikh koloniiakh’, Sotsialistichskoe Zakonodatel’stvo,10 (1991), pp. 15–17; Tkachevskii, Iu. M. ‘Reforma ispravitel’notrudovogo prava’, Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, ser. 11/3 (1993), p. 34; Evseev, V., ‘O krizisi ugolov’no-ispolnitel’noi sistemy’, Sovetskaia Iustitsiia, 12 (1991), pp. 8–9. 17. In recent years the technical deficit referred to in this woman’s comments has been addressed in women’s colonies; between 1999 and 2009 the number of women who did not use the phone because there was not one or it was frequently out of order dropped from 17.5 per cent to 0.6 per cent of the total. See Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (oshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits soderzhashchixsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), p. 54. 18. Mikhlin, A. S., ‘Bez izoliatsii ot obshchestva’, Sovetskaia Iustitsiia, 16 (1990), pp. 14–15; Antonian Iu. M. and Mikhlin, A. S., ‘Gumanisatsiia i diferentsiatsiia uslovii soderzhaniia osuzhdennykh’, Gosudarstvo i Pravo, 8 (1995), pp. 57–64. 19. Akimov, S. K. and Lysiagin, O. B., Osnovnye prava osuzhdennykh (PRI: Moscow, 2007), p. 52. 20. Antonian Iu. M. and Kolyshchnitsyna, E. H., Motivatsiia povedeniia osuzhdennykh: monografiia (Unity: Moscow, 2009), p. 13.

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21. Deriuga, N., ‘Rastozhenie braka lits, osuzhdennyk k lisheniiu svobody’, Rossiiskaia Iustitsiia, 2 (2000), p. 48; Miniazeva, T., ‘Pravovoe reguliorvanie semeinykh otnoshshenii osuzhdennykh, otbyvaiushchikh lishenie svobody’, Rossiiskaia Iustitsiia, 7 (2003), pp. 63–5. 22. Musatova, E. E., ‘Nekotorye voprosy preduprezhdeniia nasiliia v otnoshenii zhenshchin’, Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, 2 (2008), pp. 73–5; Polishchuk, E. G., ‘Voprosi tipologii zhertv prestuplenii sovershenykh v sfere semeino-bytovykh otnoshenii’, Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, 2 (2008), pp. 83–7. 23. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 48. 24. Ibid., p. 51. 25. The number of women who do not use the telephone because they ‘do not wish to do so’ has dropped from 51.8 per cent in 1999 to 17.0 per cent in 2009; the figure for men in 2009 remains high at 48.7 per cent. Ibid., p. 54. 26. The figures were calculated by summing the total number of years served by the total sample at the time of the survey (333 years 727 months) and dividing this into the total number of visits that they were entitled to over that time at the rate of 4 long and 12 short a year. The total long visit entitlement was 1,574.2 and short 4,723. The percentage rate was then calculated. 27. Whilst our survey was not comparable to the FSIN 2009 census, it was to the earlier 1999 census. Disaggregating our survey results by the type of visit (short or long), we found that 28.9 per cent of women in our survey received short visits as against 28.5 per cent in the 1999 census, but that a greater proportion of our sample received long visits, 25.8 per cent, compared with 20.1 per cent in the 1999 census. Mikhlin, A. S., Kharakteristika osuzhdennykh k lisheniiu svobody. Po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi, 1999, vol. 2 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001). 28. Malysheva, O., ‘Dlitel’nye sroki lisheniia svobody: Naznachaemye osuzhdenym zhenshchinam: sovremennye realy’, Prestuplenie i Nakazanie, 1 (2000), pp. 25–8. 29. Pallot, J., ‘ “Gde muzh, tam zhena” (Where the husband is, so is the wife): space and gender in post-Soviet patterns of penality’, Environment and Planning, A 39 (2007), pp. 570–89. 30. ‘Likusha’, Dagestan IK7, 14 October 2005: Arestant, Koloniya RF: http://www.arestant.msk.rukoorcenter1.shtml [accessed May 2012]. 31. For a more detailed description of visiting suites and their use, see Pallot, 2007, op. cit. 32. Ibid. 33. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 12. This compared favourably with the 23.1 per cent recorded for 1989 before the USSR’s collapse and 17.8 per cent in 1999, but these figures reflect the rise in commonlaw marriages. 34. Stasiulis, D. and Yuval-Davis, N., ‘Beyond dichotomies—gender, race, ethnicity and class in settler societies’, in D. Stasiulis and N. Yuval-Davis (eds), Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (Sage: London, 1995).

9 Long-Distance Motherhood What is in my thoughts most of all is the knowledge that I abandoned my son. When you are inside, you just want to pick up your child and calm down . . . God help me, but finding the strength to live through this was just so hard. (Ex-Pr, 2008) In conditions of systematic separation it is difficult to be a mother. (Mukhina, V. S. 2002)1

For insights into how we might approach understanding the effect of isolation from their children on women prisoners, we have to draw on Western, largely feminist, scholarship. Penal sociologists would agree that the deprivation of family contacts has a negative impact on all prisoners, leading to feelings of disempowerment, diminished zest for life, low self-esteem, and a turning away from relationships. Feminists insist that women’s strongly developed need for ‘connections with people’—for mutuality and empathy—means that the restrictions which prison imposes on their ability to play an active role in their family affects them more profoundly than men, and to that extent the criminal justice system discriminates against women.2 In particular, since women are the principal care-givers in most societies, it is the relationship with their children that marks out women’s experience from men’s. Imprisoning mothers has a more profound and disrupting effect on families than imprisoning fathers.3 Separation from their children is the most damaging aspect of prison for women, and is a major explanatory variable in their behaviour and sense of wellbeing behind bars.4 Suffering from grief, loss, shame, and guilt and constantly being reminded by personnel, other prisoners, and society at large that they are ‘bad mothers’, women respond with various ‘resistance survival behaviours’ including rulebreaking, manipulation and negativism, aggression, self-harm and withdrawal.5 Incarcerating mothers also impacts negatively upon children. Studies in Western jurisdictions have shown repeatedly that children of prisoners suffer. Many already live unsettled lives in households characterized by temporary accommodation, low incomes, substance abuse, and neglect, so that the removal of the care-giver can tip the balance in favour of delinquent behaviours. In the light of these consequences, it is not surprising that Western scholarship contains a strong critique of sending women beyond the reach of their families, and argues for more programmes to support families in prison, although there is a long-standing debate about whether socially isolated children should be encouraged to visit their mothers in prison, just

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as there is about whether it is right to put ‘babies behind bars’.6 The undeniable fact remains, however, that imprisoning mothers of under-age children damages the mother–child relationship, which is a strong argument for sending as few women with young children as possible to prison. Iulia Pelekhova, author of a memoir about being imprisoned in a Moscow Sizo, poses the rhetorical question of what precise danger women prisoners in Russia can pose to society if the penal service has decided they are no danger to the babies they are allowed to take with them to prison.7 The answer is that women are incarcerated for reasons other than because they are a danger to society—but that is a different discussion. The majority of women prisoners in Russia are mothers. In our survey in Mordoviian colonies, just over two-thirds (64.3 per cent) of respondents out of the population of 144 were mothers, including 42 per cent with a child under the age of 14. On average, each mother had 1.6 children. Of 69 respondents who indicated their current care-giving arrangements, over one half (59.3 per cent) had left their children with their parent(s), 19 per cent with their husband or partner, 20 per cent were in care, and 12 per cent were with grandparents or other relatives. The 20 per cent of children in care is a high figure, which reflects the weakness of welfare services in Russia and the absence of support networks for mothers and other care-givers. Women taken into custody, therefore, have a variety of choices to make with respect to their children: whether and by what channels to maintain a relationship with them, how they should be cared for, and, if they are under three, whether they should be taken with them to prison and for how long. In reality, of course, these choices are subject to a host of constraints ranging from purely practical matters, such as whether there is a place available in a colony nursery, to the willingness of family members to take the child, and the interventions of state guardianship and care organs (OOP—Organi opeka i popechitel’stva) and courts that can confirm or deny women’s parental rights.8 The attitudes of other prisoners and societal attitudes about motherhood can also be influential. The words at the beginning of this chapter indicate that the pain of separation from children is as raw for Russian prisoners as for any others. This is not how it is meant to be. The Russian penal service believes that it is a model when it comes to support of the mother–child relationship. There are 13 children’s units in women’s correctional colonies, in which on 1 January 2011 there were 863 children aged from birth to three years.9 Just 1.5 per cent of all women in correctional colonies have children with them, but, nevertheless, the provision in the correctional code for children to spend the first three years of their life with their incarcerated mothers would appear to confirm FSIN’s commitment to supporting the mother–child relationship. Together with the family visiting suites we described in the previous chapter, which provide a physical context within which their bonds with children can be renewed, the ‘Mother and Baby House’ or DMR (Dom Materi i Rebenka) within the precinct of women’s colonies represents the penal service’s attempt to create a space where women can realize the maternal role that society expects of them: where they can practise and perform motherhood. Whether this space allows them to ‘be’ mothers, as we shall see below, is another question entirely.

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‘Ready-made orphans’ The historical omens are not good. Permitting women to keep their children with them in prison is not, as it might be supposed, a product of Russia’s recent embrace of humanitarian penal standards but dates back to the Soviet period. The motherand-baby unit in one of the colonies in which we conducted interviews had been established 40 years previously in the 1960s, but the practice of taking children into custody with or without their parents extends back further to the period of Stalin’s gulag when camps were established for the children of ‘the enemies of the people’ and the state was forced to build a comprehensive network of children’s homes for the orphans generated by its carceral practices, war, and famine.10 Children’s close relationship with prison is part of Russia’s unenviable cultural heritage. The coerced mobilization to which women are subject on their journey into prisonization takes on specific forms for those women who are mothers, especially if they decide to take their young children with them. In other respects, there are aspects of the Russian management of prisoners’ children that are similar to other jurisdictions. Russian penal personnel, for example, are no strangers to the familiar taunts that women offenders, by definition, are ‘bad mothers’ and that they fall pregnant to secure privileges or to get early release, views that resonate with society at large, which believes that children should be kept as far as possible from prison, because they ‘deserve a childhood’.11 A woman’s experience of motherhood in the carceral archipelago begins when she is arrested. If she has young children and is charged with an offence carrying a sentence of under five years—in Russian terms, a not very serious offence—she may be allowed to stay at home for the investigation and until her court appearance. Mothers of young children who are charged with more serious offences and, therefore, committed to a remand prison have the choice of taking their young child with them or making alternative arrangements, such as leaving them with a relative. The proportion of women who decide on the first course constitutes a small but significant sub-population of women prisoners on remand who, together with women in the last stages of pregnancy, are entitled to occupy separate cells from the general population of women prisoners. In Moscow, 8–10 women occupy cells in the women’s Sizo, which are kitted out with beds rather than bunks, and cots for the infants. In other Sizos, shortage of space can mean that mothers and pregnant women are not separated from other prisoners; in these cases they have to fit into the normal, often overcrowded, cells. For the period that she is on remand the mother’s relationship with her child is very close; they are together 24 hours of the day. Indeed, like other prisoners on remand, mothers and pregnant women are locked in these cells for most of the day and have just two hours exercise (compared with the normal one hour), although they are entitled to more.12 In her memoir, Iulia Pelekhova writes movingly of seeing two-year-olds walking with their hands behind their backs in a circle beside their mothers in the exercise yard, a sight ‘worse than being kicked in the stomach’ and evidence of the ‘catastrophe of imprisonment’.13 Parenthetically, she also notes the insubstantial nature of the

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supplementary diet that mothers and pregnant women received: half a boiled egg, a portion of margarine, and powdered milk.14 Mothers are not separated from their babies even when they are taken to court; mother and child travel in the standard avtozek and are subjected to a joint search by the guards (this takes place, Pelekhova tells us, in the room where all prisoners are searched, without any regard to the risks to young babies’ health).15 It is widely assumed that women take their babies to the hearing of their case to obtain a reduction in the severity of their sentence. This might well be the case, but it also reflects the absence of safe alternative care arrangements for babies in remand prisons and the fact that women fear that if their case finishes and they are taken immediately for transportation they will not be re-united with their child. The order to prepare for transportation signals the beginning of the end of the intimate contact a mother has had with her child over the weeks and months of remand and the beginning of separation. The first stage of separation is during quarantine, which for mothers and babies lasts three to four rather than the normal two weeks, and is a period when the mother sees progressively less of her child, as it is ‘accustomed’ to living without her.16 The second stage is when the mother is sent to her detachment. The peculiarity of the Russian system is that mother and children live separately in correctional facilities; in Al’pern’s words, ‘[T]hey both continue to live in one territory . . . but now are kept apart by impenetrable obstacles for the prisoner: the local zones, the document control points, the strict rules. To breach these obstacles is forbidden and brings with it all the usual consequences—the disciplinary cells and forfeiture of any chance of early release.’17 Children are confined to the Mother and Baby House (DMR) and the mothers to the workshop and detachment. The mothers have access during their spare time to their children, but since they are subject to the normal spatio-temporal order of the colony this turns out, in reality, to be limited to the hours after work and before evening roll call that are not filled with ‘activities’. In IK2 in Mordoviia the compound which houses the nursery is secured behind 6-foot-high fences and consists of a collection of buildings and a playground with climbing frames and flower beds. The fences are decorated with figures from folk tales. The unit replicates almost exactly a state children’s care home, which is precisely what it is intended to be, only with the unusual feature that the children’s mothers are the other side of the decorated fences and visit once or twice a day to take classes on parenting and for playtime, or, if they are breastfeeding, for the four-hourly feed. The regime of childcare in children’s units is the same as in any other children’s home, and it is delivered by a large contingent of staff, some medically trained, and educators. In IK2, Mordoviia, the nursery staff consists of 15 nurses, four care-givers, and two doctors for 70–80 children. Effectively, therefore, professional care-givers, not the natural mothers, are the principal decision-makers on all aspects of the infants’ needs. The mother in this schema is stripped of her agency, and her role is reduced to that of providing ‘maternal love’ two hours a day and breast milk. Al’pern, a scathing critic of the system, accuses colony nurseries of producing ‘ready-made orphans’, thereby perpetuating ‘one of the gulag’s inhuman

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traditions’.18 The gulag reference would be contested by the personnel involved in rearing prisoners’ children, who would argue that much of their effort is directed towards teaching often uneducated and inadequately-prepared women the parenting skills they will need, so they can take on full maternal responsibilities once they are released. However, this argument fails to recognize that the regime of disciplined motherhood to which they subject mothers may, in fact, undermine the development of the mother–child relationship. We return to this point later. It can be seen, therefore, that the decision a woman faces, between keeping her child with her in prison or opting for an alternative arrangement, is not a choice between herself as principal care-giver and another person or institution, but rather involves the evaluation of the relative merits of a number of ‘others’, including the professionals in the colony. In this situation, it is perhaps not surprising that the women in our study were divided about the merits of prisoners keeping children with them. Of our questionnaire survey respondents, only just over one-third expressed approval of children’s units in correctional colonies, with the number who thought them to be a bad idea or who were undecided equally divided (31.4 per cent each). Our interview partners talked about the babies’ calming influence on mothers and the happiness they bring: for example, ‘the child is with the mother and sits on her lap . . . that’s a great thing’ (Pr 20) and ‘they are really happy that the kid is there and with all that maternal affection . . . everyone is really happy’ (Pr 26). The beneficial effects are recognized by the women who do not have children in the colony themselves: one in Mordoviia telling us that hearing children’s laughter coming from the playground ‘really lifts your spirits’ (Pr 14). However, there was little confidence among our survey respondents that the DMR units are good for the babies: only about 31 per cent in our questionnaire survey thought they had a good impact on the children, with about a quarter saying they thought the effect on the children was negative. The ambivalence that women expressed about colony nurseries is grounded in a strong belief that a correctional colony is an inappropriate place in which to bring up a child. It cancels out in their minds the recognized benefits of maternal love and the quality care that, for the most part, the women believed is delivered in colony nurseries. Thus, whilst there was a consensus that during the early months of its life a baby should be with its mother, there was also a strongly expressed belief that it should be given up sooner rather than later if there are relatives who agree to take it. But where there are no family care-givers, the view was that it was best to hang on to the child for as long as possible, rather than let it disappear into the state care system. This is how some of the women we interviewed justified the decisions they had made: I have a child who is 2 years 2 months old. He was 2 when I was sent here. I think a child needs to be with his mum but not in here . . . my baby is with my parents, aunts, and uncles. (Pr 16, sentence unknown) My daughter has just turned 4 years old . . . I was pregnant when I got here and kept my baby for 11 months in the prison nursery, but then I gave her to my sister . . . [She] is 40, older than me, and is divorced. I do think a baby needs to be with its mother, but my baby is better

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off in Moscow where it can be free to play and be taken for walks.’ (Pr 30, sentenced to 4 years 3 months) Much better to have the children’s unit here than to send the kids to an orphanage. Here the child will always receive the love and affection of its mother. I think 3 years is a good length of time to get to know the child. (Pr 31, sentenced to 5 years 10 months)

For the most part women who had a child in the colony’s DMR were positive about the level of care they received, but some did express their feeling of disempowerment in the face of the rules. The woman we quote below contrasts the freedom she had to be a mother in the prison hospital and Sizo with the discipline she was subjected to once she arrived in the colony: I stayed in the hospital with the baby when it was born and it was fine; the nurse helped and there was a crib right next to my bed . . . There are small rooms for mothers and babies that are separated by glass petitions. But that’s fine with me; after all some of us are in here for murder. It’s hard to live normally, though, whatever that word means . . . When you move to the colony it is very hard. In the prison hospital I could do what I wanted and go where I wanted, but now it’s up at 6, drink tea, go to the toilet . . . all quite regulated . . . It was normal and better before, yes. Now it’s tougher . . . even the breastfeeding. I was feeding the child for 9 months but now it’s a different picture. I used to wash the nappies and so on but now it’s different. (Pr 23, sentenced to 7 years)

We were curious to know how penal personnel interpret the three-year age limit to keeping children in colonies. Personnel responded with one voice that the reason for three years is that at this age children begin to understand ‘where they are’ and must be protected from this knowledge. So, for example, according to one staff member in IK2, Mordoviia: ‘[I]t is better if a child leaves at three. When a child is four, he has the capacity to remember so he should go so he doesn’t remember [the colony].’

The Director of the DRM in IK2 confirmed the need to move children on before they understood where they are: We do have some children up to the age of 4 but it is rare and it happens only if they are ill. It’s hard [on the women] but I think the 3-year limit is right. A child does not remember much at the age of 3 but by 4 he starts to really understand where he is.

This view is consistent with a discourse about prison as a ‘troubled place’, that is, by definition, unfit for mothering. Later in the interview the Director clarified what, for her, is the principal merit of allowing prisoners to keep their babies: I am a paediatrician and I think that breastfeeding the child and the child being with the mother is the best situation . . . When the child is little, it should be here and I do not think that there is any difference between here and the outside, except that the mother gets to see the child just for a few hours. She’s feeding him and we encourage contact. There’s no difference really.

The suggestion that there is no difference to the building of mother–child relationships between the prolonged period of contact a mother can have with her baby in

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a home environment and the 2–3 hours of supervised contact that she may have with her child in prison is a curious comment from a health professional. It reflects the fact that the interest of colony nurseries lies with the well-being of the child, not with the rehabilitation of the mother, which lies with the colony re-educators. This division of responsibility is symbolized in the confinement of mothers and their children to different spaces in the colony. Whilst she is at work in the colony workshops or sleeping in the dormitory, the woman is a prisoner, not a mother; she assumes that role only when she enters the controlled space of the nursery. In fact, for the DMR Director, the optimal solution would be for nurseries to be located outside the compound of the colony, with all the mothers being driven there to visit their children once a day. The moment of having to give up a child who has accompanied her on the journey from Sizo to colony can be acutely painful for mothers. The women we quoted earlier, who decided to give their children to relatives rather then keep them in the colony, may indeed have had the child’s best interests at heart, but each might also have been protecting herself from the pain that eventual separation would bring. The following extended quote from a 37-year-old woman serving an 8-year sentence conveys the complex emotions that women have to cope with as they decide whether to give birth in prison, or to abort the pregnancy, and whether to keep a child, or to give it up for adoption: I found out that I was pregnant [in the Moscow Sizo] and I figured that as I was in for 8 years I would have an abortion because by the time I am out it will be grown-up and it would be difficult to develop a relationship with him. But the doctor persuaded me otherwise by saying I should imagine his sweet face, so I decided to keep it and I gave birth to a baby boy in prison. Thank God it was my second time because the contractions were terrible and I kept screaming to get me an ambulance . . . The whole experience was awful . . . I kind of just wanted to give the child up really, to hand him over to the doctors. So I did just that. I never heard his first cries or his first words. I never got to read poems to him. Now, I do see him, though I’m at work most of the time. He’s two and a half now . . . he’s lovely. I don’t know whether I should have given him to relatives, so that it’s not so hard when he leaves. I don’t know if it would have been better . . . (Pr 23)

The painful transition from having their baby with them to giving it up and returning to ‘childless’ status is supposed to be dampened by a provision that allows women furloughs to settle their child with the new care-givers. But, as one longserving officer told us, ‘now they don’t allow it, not in one colony’. She explained that the practice of granting leave effectively ended in the 1990s. In a meeting we had with General Mal’kov, the head of Ufsin-Mordoviia in 2007, the greater part of the discussion consisted of him explaining to us the ‘experiment’ begun in 2002 in IK2 of a new way of managing mothers and babies in prison. The experiment, of which he is justifiably proud, was the introduction into the existing colony nursery of a mother-and-baby unit which allows for new mothers actually to live with their babies in small rooms for three to four ‘pairs’.19 The purpose was to encourage mothers to ‘develop the maternal instinct’ and, therefore, be less inclined to abandon their child after release.20

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The unit is in a separate building within the enclosure for the colony nursery. Not all women with neonates are selected for a place in the ‘new’ unit (there were nine places in 2007) but have to go through a selection process. The director of the unit explained its advantages: It is good for the women to be able to be with their babies in the unit. Many are only 20–25 years old and in this way they can see how other mothers look after their children. That’s one advantage. The other is that it’s really good for the child to be with its mother. We have a lot of professionals here but it is the love of the mother that is important.

It is striking that the director’s justification draws on the mother-love trope that we found was a constant theme in our discussions with personnel and prisoners alike about motherhood in prison. In our questionnaire survey we asked prisoners about the new-style mother-and-baby unit and a large minority of respondents (43.3 per cent) expressed their approval, higher than for the standard arrangements. The following description one 34-year-old woman (we do not know her sentence) gave us of her experiences of mothering in the unit acknowledges its benefits: It’s bad for your head in here . . . Having a child doesn’t really change that, although my baby did calm me down and improved my mood. I even sometimes forget that I am here. We are looked after [in the unit] and the food is good and the children clothed well and so on . . . I’ve learned a lot about child-rearing here. For example, I know what to do if the child has an allergy, when it’s better to swaddle a baby or leave it to kick, and all about teething and so on, or what to do if they cry; it might not be because they are hungry or being naughty . . . they might just want to play. There’s a lot of help nearby. The main thing though that I’ve learned is that I live for my child and want my freedom for her. I would do anything so that I don’t have to be separated from her. (Pr 16)

This woman continued to say that in her experience it was vital for mothers to be able to be with their babies all the time, and she criticized fellow prisoners who had children in the standard nursery but did not visit often. This may indeed be a valid criticism, but, as we have seen, the regime in the standard DMR units of correctional colonies is disempowering for mothers, allowing them little role in decision-making about their children. The result is that the initial presupposition about prisoners necessarily making inadequate mothers becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this respect, it is worth noting that the definition of what constitutes ‘a good mother’ among personnel in prison nurseries, notwithstanding the allimportant ‘mother-love’, appears to be measured by the acquisition of practical skills in nappy changing and so on. We assume that it is on these skills that the ‘best mother in the colony’ competitions, which we learned take place in some colonies, are judged. No doubt within the prison service there is discussion among healthcare specialists (who, as distinct from in the UK, are members of the penal service) about the outcome of their care measures with infants; and among the ranks of educators, psychologists, and security personnel, the impact on the mothers. But if scientific studies have been made, these have not been published. In the West, studies of the effects of prison on babies (which normally compare this group with those

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who are left with relatives or in care homes) have tended to conclude that prison sui generis does not have lasting damage on children; rather, that it is the issues concerning preventable experiences which frequently attend the incarceration of the mother, and pre-prison factors, that can be problematic.21 But, of course, in the West the arrangements for babies in prison are different from in the Russian Federation. In Russia’s case, the model of the orphanage and foundling home, with their environment of restrictions and deprivation of human contact and relationships, is the more apposite comparator. There is a study on prison mothers—their psychological states and adaptation— by the psychologist Valeriia Mukhina, sponsored by a prison reform NGO.22 It was based on a survey of 100 mothers with babies in DMR units in two women’s colonies, in Mozhaisk and Mordoviia. The study’s findings were extremely pessimistic, showing that, in the context of the current practice of restricting access of mothers to their infants, the development of a normal mother–child relationship is impeded, compounding the pre-existing negative factors (principal among which Mukhina considers to be the absence of a husband/partner). Among her sample she identified three types of mother–child relationship. These were, firstly, where the child is an object of manipulation by the mother (for example, to secure for her the resolution of everyday tasks in the colony); secondly, where the value of the child is elevated by the mother to an exaggerated degree; and thirdly, where the mother is indifferent to the child and her relationship with him or her passive or dismissive. All three conditions, the last of which Mukhina found most prevalent in her sample and the second least developed, are in different ways bad for both child and mother. She is unequivocal in her recommendation that this gloomy picture would be improved if mother and child had ‘their own living space where they can keep their own things and know where they are when they next want to play with them’.23 With the number of women being incarcerated in Russia scheduled to grow, we can expect the number of babies in jail to rise, perhaps, to the 1,000 mark. The absence of any reference in the new reform concept to motherand-baby units does not hold out much ground for optimism that this will be a priority in the restructuring scheduled to take place.

Long-distance mothering If the current arrangements in DMR units for developing a relationship between mother and child are far from perfect, once the child is resettled outside the colony the prospects for the mother maintaining a relationship with her child decline sharply. Women in Russian penal colonies have to struggle against steep odds to retain active involvement in their child’s upbringing, with inevitable consequences for their feelings of self-worth and confirming in their minds society’s negative stereotyping. In the majority of cases, imprisonment leads to the loss of any physical contact between mother and child. Not for Russian women prisoners the luxury of regular visits from the child to sit on its mother’s

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knee or play at her feet, the image so beloved of US TV documentaries of the American penitentiary. In the West, figures for prison visitation by young children, hovering around the 40–50 per cent mark, form the basis for criticism of women’s prisons location; but this is nothing compared with the Russian Federation.24 Our questionnaire survey in colonies in Mordoviia revealed that of 144 respondents, just six had received visits from their child in the previous year. In the Russian context an annual visit would be considered ‘frequent’, as the following conversation in 2007 with a divorced woman incarcerated in Mordoviia indicates. Her two children are in Voronezh, 500 kilometres away: We write and talk on the phone. They don’t come and visit much because we have agreed that the children’s welfare is what’s most important – and there are money difficulties. The last time I saw my kids was in 2005 – train travel is just way too much. We’d really like the kids to come every 18 months with my parents . . . (Pr 16)

Above we argued that a negative understanding of prison as an appropriate place in which to realize the mother–child relationship informed the decisions that women had to make about whether to keep their child with them in prison. We found that attitudes about how to manage the relationship with their children outside prison were informed by the same prejudices, with the result that among personnel and prisoners there is a strong presumption that it is best for children not to visit. This respondent, mother of two children, explains why she did not expect any further visits during her 12-year sentence: I had my baby in the colony but I gave him to my family after four months . . . there was nothing for him here . . . My mum would bring the older child but not the younger one. It’s not good for a child’s psyche. Telephone conversations are better and the child can then hear Mum’s voice and be reassured that she’s OK. The child will know that Mum’s still alive and that’s the main thing. (Pr 18)

The following response of a senior officer in a penal colony in Mordoviia, asked whether she supports visits from children, shows the same conflicted attitudes towards child visitation that exist in other jurisdictions:25 The visits are artificial. But still some do come . . . If the child is still young we often hear them say things like, ‘Mummy works here so that she can earn money to buy me things’. When a child is young it’s easy to fool them in this way, but once they are older I think they will always be traumatized by a visit. It’s a delicate issue of course. It’s just not obvious what’s better – to have a meeting or not. It’s exactly the same with telephone conversations. The women have somehow to explain their absence, name it, give a reason.

The officer alludes to the fact that prisoners and care-givers are reluctant to name the place as ‘prison’. The interviews with prisoners confirmed the practice of concealing the nature of the colony from children. Most often, the explanation given for the mother’s absence is that she is in hospital (although why the long-term hospitalization of a mother is less traumatic for a child than being told she is in prison begs a question), but there are other explanations, such as where children

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were told that their grandmother was working at a ‘secret factory’. As the comments of the officer suggests, the subterfuge is maintained even when, exceptionally, children are brought on visits. One of the ex-prisoner interviewees offered the following reflection on the practice: INTERVIEWEE: There is that moment when they allow children into the zone. I think Parents’ Days are absolutely idiotic, truthfully speaking. They see their beloved mother in these strange clothes . . . the younger ones start to ask questions—is this a hospital? INTERVIEWER: And they say it is a hospital? INTERVIEWEE: Yes, they tell them it’s a hospital, that Mummy’s being treated. For the older children I think it’s just stressful . . . for some reason I always remember the bit in the film, you know, Burnt by the Sun, where they carry aloft that portrait of Stalin, a great scene, eh?26 (Ex-Pr 3)

In the case of another interviewee, the reason for concealment was to protect the child from bullying: Yes, my mother brought my oldest here once. But I told her not to bring him again because he’s already big, he’s such a lad . . . When I’m released and someone says to him that his mother was in prison, I’ll deal with it, but so long as I’m not there, he doesn’t need this. [When he came here on a visit] he was happy. He was everywhere where I was, he wouldn’t even let me go to the toilet. He said to me in the visiting room, ‘Come on, Mummy, let’s swing on the door.’ He didn’t understand, he thought, well . . . It’s just that it’s difficult for me; I can’t find the words to tell him that I can’t go to him, the words just won’t come. And now, when I phone home I try to make sure it’s when he’s not there, so that he can’t hear me. He asks such difficult questions: ‘Mummy, when are you coming home? Mummy, what sort of hospital is it that you’re in?’ He’s waiting, he constantly asks, and I constantly make promises to him. I’m already sick of the deception. (Pr 26)

The unease about the practice of concealing the truth, as this example shows, can take its toll on prisoners, but they justify it as being in the interests of the child’s psychological and physical well-being. As in the above, the ‘solution’ to the difficulty of explaining her situation is sought by some prisoners in an avoidance response. Western research has shown that conflicts between mothers and care-givers on the outside are not uncommon. Most often these focus on the costs of childcare; elderly parents, for example, might find their budget strained by the extra mouth(s) to feed, as well as finding their health problems exacerbated. On the woman prisoner’s part there are always anxieties about whether the child is being well looked after and how far the care-givers can be trusted. The issue of trust was raised most in the women’s talk when their children had been left in the care of a partner or husband, a rare occurrence that normally came about because of the threat that a child would be taken into care. Women have to pay ‘alimony’ for their child out of their wages from colony production (as, indeed, they do for their own board and lodging). The fact that this alimony is paid over to the care-giver was a source of anxiety for some women if, for example, the parent had a history of alcohol abuse:

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Why do I have to send it to him? I begrudge him this money, it’s meant to be for the children. If only I knew whether they see any of it. (Pr 39)

Inevitably, being confined is frustrating for women trying to organize their children’s care by remote control, but the extreme distances in the Russian Federation, combined with a slow postal service, poor inter-agency communication, and a shortage of telephones in colonies, exacerbate the problems. One woman, a divorcee on a 2-year sentence, described to us the almost Kafkaesque difficulties she encountered in trying to organize the paperwork she needed to transfer care of her nine-year-old to the child’s father, who had agreed to take him on even though he had had no involvement with him since the divorce some years previously. An exacerbating factor was the 800-kilometre distance between the colony and her home town: INTERVIEWEE: The problem was that I was so far away. INTERVIEWER: Couldn’t you ask your ex-husband to go to the school and, for example, get a letter to say that she is a pupil there and that they all know you? INTERVIEWEE: He went to the school, but the school said it needed a letter from the correctional colony. But then the colony needed the precise address of the school. So I had to write to Komi again to find this out. INTERVIEWER: Couldn’t you just have phoned? INTERVIEWEE: But here phoning isn’t so easy . . . I phone him and say that I need the school’s address. Then the next time I can call is a month later. (Pr 40)

The ability to earn wages in penal production constitutes an important resource for women who want to remain part of their children’s lives. It was obvious that, apart from wages being used to pay for children’s support, either through formal alimony deductions or direct transfers, women saved up to buy presents for their children. So we learned of prisoners buying crayons and paper for their children at the beginning of the school year and saving for birthday and New Year presents. Despite presents, telephone calls, and letters, it was obvious from our conversations that the absence of regular face-to-face contact had opened up an emotional gap between mother and child and that the longer the sentence, the wider that gap. The saddest cases were those when children brought on a visit did not know their mother. One woman described how her child mistook other prisoners for her—all were wearing the regulation headscarf and the photograph the child had been shown of her was of her in prison clothes. It is not surprising that women, especially with long sentences, expressed anxieties about growing apart, as in this case of a woman serving an 18-year sentence in a Mordoviian colony: The first two years I really missed the children. Then they began to write and I calmed down a bit, just a bit. We speak on the phone often. So it got better for me. The two boys, I really believe, are on the right path. My older one has become so independent. I have urged him in letters not to abandon the young one and he hasn’t. The daughter-in-law is a good girl.

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It’s true we’ve never met, but she says she’s going to visit. I’m afraid. I look at the photos, one was 5 and the other 13 and now one’s a grown man, and I have a grandson 2 years 2 months old, and he’s already a little boy. As for my youngest, I don’t know him. I didn’t recognize him in the last photo they sent. He was 5, no, he wasn’t even 5 . . . I want to go home but I am afraid. It’s frightening to return to my children. Letters are one thing, and talking on the phone, but as it is now [without seeing them] I am just scared. (Pr 62)

As Stephanie Covington reminds us, fears surrounding the ability to re-connect emotionally with a child can lead to permanent separation; we have no reason to believe that Russia is an exception to this rule.27

Children in care Women whose children have been taken into care face the biggest struggle to remain involved in their lives. This may be because the women literally lose track of their child if he or she is moved between care homes; or it may be because of the reluctance of foster parents to engage with the natural mother. This last problem was experienced by one woman (Pr 34) serving a 14-year sentence whose youngest daughter had been fostered out by the care home in which she had been placed. The prisoner’s feeling of disempowerment when she was informed that her daughter, we shall call her Dina (the shortened form of Daniia), had been fostered then became more intense as she learned of decisions that the foster parents had made about her child. A relevant point is that the prisoner is a Tatar, a Muslim, although not practising, and the foster parents Russian Orthodox. We see in the following extracts the mother struggling to retain her involvement with the child and to calm her anxieties in the face of what we learned was the foster parents’ hope that fostering would lead to adoption (they already had adopted one child, Natasha). Her story-telling begins when she has just been read a letter from the care home telling her of the new arrangement for Dina: So I immediately write back. N. L. [the detachment leader] says, ’Come on, stay calm, write politely, nicely’. Well, I wrote once, twice, three times, I suppose, and it began to get better and I began to understand that [the care home] wouldn’t have given her to bad people they don’t know . . . It would have been better if I’d know about it before it happened . . . You know, I would have agreed, after all it means she is in a family, which is better.

She continued describing the phone calls and letters she exchanged with her daughter and her pride at reports she had received of her success and popularity at school, but anxieties creep into her talk. She was clearly uncomfortable with aspects of Dina’s care: I ask them [the foster parents] questions and they answer honestly, they describe everything. They compare the two of them, so Dina is less excitable, calmer, concentrates better, but Natasha is lazy. They write about how when they go to their allotment Dina always helps but Natasha doesn’t. And it’s the same in school. And they write that Dina is popular among her classmates, that she’s respected and others ask her advice. Only they don’t call

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her Dina, they call her Daniia . . . but I’m not against that. They’ve also christened her, I’m not against that either.

Whilst insistent that the ‘re-naming’ and christening of her child is all right with her, she returns to these issues later in the interview, reassuring us (herself) that it really is all right: When A. S. [the foster mother] writes that Daniia has done this or that, I didn’t like it at first that they call her Daniia. And then . . . well, she’s Daniia to them, but to me she is still my Dina. Well, we’ll see what I end up calling her. And they wrote to me to say they’d christened her. I’m not against it. And they’ve done other things, but I’m not against them. They’re the ones with her. It’s only a little thing and I’m grateful that they are bringing her up well.

The only way she has of remaining involved in Dina’s life is by sending money to help with her education: She [the foster mother] says it’s not necessary. I say it is necessary – for notebooks, for pens for Dina. So, in addition to the alimony I pay more for her upkeep, I send extra. I really want to do my bit.

Other women among the current prisoner interview group explained that they had received letters from children’s homes telling them of their child’s progress. Sadly, this is the exception rather than the rule as, judging from our interviews, the more common outcome of children being taken into care is that mothers lose track of them and separation is permanent. We were told by women of children transferred between care homes without the mother being informed and unfair and unjustified deprivation by the courts of their parental rights. These were part of the women’s identity-work and must be understood as not necessarily ‘true’ in the objective sense of that word. Given the opprobrium attached to women who abandon their children, we did not expect the women we interviewed to take responsibility for losing contact. Nevertheless, personnel confirmed that a real problem exists in coordination between correctional colonies and the state guardianship and care organs and that these were exacerbated by distance. As one former prisoner observed: there were a lot of women in prison who had kids in children’s homes. What’s odd is that they had to pay alimony for them, but they didn’t even know where they were. They’d find out that the kids have been fostered but they don’t know where. It’s just like losing parental rights. (Ex-Pr 13)

The director of the DMR unit in IK2 in Mordoviia deplored the fact that some women could not find out where their children were, because it ‘affects how the woman feels about her child and her attitudes towards the colony’. She explained that the DMR is able to request that a child who has reached the age of three be placed in a local children’s home, which is helpful, but it has no influence over where children left on the outside are placed; the best situation would be if children were brought from their home region to a nearby children’s home so that visits to the mother in prison could be arranged.28 Women told us of how personnel try to help them compose letters to local authorities and make enquiries on

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their behalf about their children. The reluctance of women prisoners to see their children taken into care is grounded in a justified anxiety that the child could be lost to the mother forever. The threshold to reclaiming a child on release is high: documentary proof of parental rights, a place to live and regular employment, combined with fears about reconnecting with the child are fertile ground for temporary separation becoming permanent.

Conclusion In this chapter we have shown that geographical distance is implicated in the failure of mothers to develop effective relationships with children left with parents or with care agencies. It was striking how the distance of colonies emerged as a theme in women’s struggles to be involved in their children’s lives. The fact that children are a long way away not only was an obstacle to visitation, but affected all aspects of prisoners’ attempts to be involved in decisions about their children, which had to be conducted at arms’ length through the post. The dislocation in space of correctional colonies, families, and the care agencies meant that there could be no ‘joined up’ resolution of problems as they arose in the management of children. Wound into these practical problems is the cultural predisposition for everyone involved with prisoners’ children towards the view that these children were better off without their mothers. This was most visibly expressed in the separation of mothers from their babies within the precinct of the prison. The message the penal authorities convey to women prisoners is that the state, in the form of its professional carers, does a better job of nurturing children than can offending mothers. This is a message that a majority of the mothers of young children in prison appear to have internalized. All this conspires against women realizing their identity as mothers and for each must augur badly for the rediscovery/ reassertion of that identity after release. The difficulty of maintaining a relationship with their children did prompt discussion among our interview group of the rectitude of imprisoning women with children at all. ‘What’s really going on,’ observed one, ‘is that the majority of the women in correctional colonies should have been given suspended sentences.’ Interestingly, the prisoner and personnel with whom we spoke were mostly in agreement with this statement. They also understood that the limited engagement which women prisoners had with the outside world, whether this was because they were abandoned by partners, had lost contact with their children, or had told their elderly parents not to visit, meant that they had to look inward to the colony to other prisoners for the connections with other people. The maintenance of family ties has been shown to be linked to lower levels of institutionalization into prison subculture. The corollary of this is that when those ties are missing, the depression, paranoia, anxiety, and suicidal tendencies that result push prisoners towards adaptation to prison subculture and lower compliance with institutional norms. This situation is notoriously the case in Russian correctional institutions for men. In the next chapter we examine how the

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absence of links consequent upon their double isolation affects women’s social relationships within the colony.

Notes 1. Mukhina, V. S., Problema materinstva i mental’nosti zhenshchin v mestakh lisheniia svobody. Lichnost’ v ekstremal’nykh usloviiakh (Research for PRI: Moscow, 2002), p. 21. 2. Covington, S. A., ‘Women’s journey home’, in J. Travis and M. Waul (eds), Prisoners Once Removed (The Urban Institute: Washington, DC, 2003), pp. 67–103. 3. Sheehan, R. and Flynn, C., ‘Women prisoners and their children’, in R. Sheehan, G. McIvor, and C. Trotter (eds), What Works with Women Offenders (Willan: Cullompton, 2007), pp. 214–39; Mumola, C. J., Incarcerated Parents and their Children (US Department of Corrections: Washington, DC, 2000). 4. Banauch, P., Mothers in Prison (Transaction Books: New Brunswick, 1985); Bloom, B. and Steinhart, D., Why Punish the Children? A Reappraisal of the Children of Incarcerated Mothers in America (National Council on Crime and Delinquency: San Francisco, 1993); Dodge, M. and Pogrebin, M. R., ‘Collateral costs of imprisonment for women: complications of reintegration’, Prison Journal, 81/1 (2001), pp. 42–54; Hairstone, C. F., ‘Mothers in jail: parent–child separation and jail visitation’, Affilia, 6/2 (1991), pp. 9–27. 5. Enos, S., Mothering from the Inside: Parenting in a Women’s Prison (State University of New York: New York, 2002); Liebling, A., Suicides in Prison (Routledge: London, 1992). 6. Sack, W. H. and Seidler, J., ‘Should children visit their parents in prison?’, Law and Human Behaviour, 2/3 (1978), pp. 261–6. 7. Pelekhova, Iu., Sensatsionnaia Pravda o Zhenskikh Tiur’makh. Dnevnik Zakliuchennoi (Astrel’: Moscow, 2009), p. 248. 8. The OOP—guardianship and care organs—are located in municipal authorities and they are responsible for taking into care those children who have been identified by the courts as being at risk. The OOP seems to be reactive rather than proactive with respect to the children of prisoners, in that it only interferes if approached to do so. 9. Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) po materialam spetsial’noi perepisi osuzhdennykh i lits, soderzhashchikhsia pod strazhei 12–18 noiabria 2009, p. 45. 10. Khlevniuk, O. V., The History of the Gulag. From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2004), pp 124–9. 11. Al’pern, L., Son i Iav’ Zhenskoi Tiur’my (Aleteiia: St Petersburg, 2004), p. 153. 12. Al’pern, L. (ed.), Zhenshchiny i Deti v Rossiiskoi Tiur’me: Sbornik Materialov (TsSRUP: Moscow, 2001), p. 65. 13. Pelekhova, op. cit., pp. 247–8. 14. Ibid., p. 249. 15. Ibid., p. 248. 16. Al’pern, L, Vsego lish’ desiataia chast’. . . zametki posetitelia tiurem (TsSRUP: Moscow, 2001), p. 26. 17. Ibid., pp. 152–3. 18. Ibid., p. 154. 19. The initiative for the setting up of the unit came from the NGO Penal Reform International, which worked with the colony, and it was funded by the Ford Foundation. Although the unit has now operated successfully for nearly a decade, the idea has not been rolled out to other colonies. 20. Vremia i Zhizn’, 9 September 2006, p. 2. 21. See, for example, Caddle, D. and Crisp, D., Imprisoned Women and Mothers (Home Office Research and Statistics Directorate London, 1997); Catan, L., ‘Infants and mothers in prison’, in R. Shaw (ed.), Prisoners’ Children. What are the Issues? (Routledge: London, 1992), pp. 13–28.

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22. Mukhina, op. cit. 23. Ibid., p. 14. 24. Covington, op. cit., p. 77; Loucks, N., ‘Women in prison’, in J. R. Adler and J. M. Gray (eds), Forensic Psychology: Concepts, Debates, Practice (Willan: Abingdon, 2010), p. 475; Slotboom, A.-M., Kruttschnitt, C., Bijleveld, C., and Menting, B., ‘Psychological well-being of incarcerated women in the Netherlands: importation or deprivation?’, Punishment & Society, 13 (2011), p. 186. 25. Sack, W. H. and Seidler, J., ‘Should children visit their parents in prison?’, Law and Human Behaviours, 2/3 (1978), pp. 261–6; Banauch, op. cit.; Bloom and Steinhart, op. cit.; Mumola, op. cit. 26. In referring to the film Burnt by the Sun, the prisoner is drawing a comparison with Stalinist repression and the gulag. The film, which made a big splash in Russia and was distributed in the West also, concerned the Stalinist secret police and the arrest of a member of the intelligentsia. 27. Covington, op. cit., p. 77. 28. In an attempt to foster the maternal role, one colony brings children from a nearby children’s care home into the prison for a ‘day out’; we were told that the women prisoners put a lot of effort into making presents for the children and they buy them sweets. This was one of the occasions when, observing through a Western feminist lens, we found Russian practice difficult to understand. The other occasions when we had this difficulty were the beauty pageants and the practice of taking juvenile girls to perform plays and light entertainment in strict regime men’s colonies.

10 Social Relationships Behind the Colony Fences ‘I don’t have any friends here, only acquaintances.’ (Pr 33: IK2, Mordoviia, 2007)

These words were a common refrain among our interview partners. The sentiment is not peculiar to Russia: prison sociologists have documented similar denials that conventional friendship can exist between prisoners in other penal jurisdictions. The first flush of prison sociologies in the 1960s taught us that prisoners use various coping strategies in their relationships with other prisoners and staff in order to protect themselves psychologically and physically in the ‘low trust environment’ that is the prison. These strategies include joining a gang, using sex to intimidate or gain favours, becoming a ‘trustie’ or an aggressor, and adopting defensive behaviours, such as ‘withdrawal’ and never committing wholeheartedly to a relationship.1 With conflict never far below the surface, it is no wonder that prisoners are suspicious of one another and are reluctant to invest in the sort of trusting relationship that can be captured by the word ‘friendship’ in English, or druzhba in Russian. But, as we shall see below, trusting relationships do exist in Russian correctional institutions: prisoners’ reluctance to label these as ‘friendships’ may be a comment as much on their rejection of prison as a ‘place’ as about the nature of the relationships they make on their transformative journey from Sizo to eventual release. Alison Liebling identifies the quality of interpersonal relationships—the degree to which they are based on trust, respect, and fairness—among the indicators that differentiate the ‘moral performance’ of prisons in the UK. Prisons, she argues, are crucially shaped by relationships that are ‘formed over time, by values, practices, memories, and feelings, and by the way these interact’.2 Although the limitations imposed on our empirical research meant that we could not make detailed inter-colony comparisons in Russia, nevertheless the reminder is apposite that for all the ‘essential similarities’ of prisons’ social structure, the nature of interpersonal relationships differ from one prison to another. It is also important to remember that, with some notable exceptions, research on prison sociology has largely concerned men. Russian penology is no different in this respect from Western.3 The analysis that follows, therefore, strikes out into largely uncharted territory.

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In previous chapters we have identified various ways in which the penal experience in Russia is different from in the West, focusing in on ‘geographical processes’ that operate at different spatial scales. The distribution of correctional colonies, the location of many in remote and inaccessible places, subjects prisoners to arduous transportations that take them far away from their ‘home’ region and deposits them in self-contained penal territorial complexes where they experience a repetitive routine of communal living, labour, and recreation. As we showed in the previous two chapters, one consequence of this spatial dislocation is a particularly low contact with the outside world. This is a spatiality of confinement that simultaneously subjects prisoners to isolation and to the physical and psychological compression of life en masse, shaping ‘the society of prisoners’ in very specific ways. But geography is not all; history has to be added to the mix. Following Rock’s observation that old prisons have memories (and passing ideologies) ‘almost seeping from their walls’, Russian penal colonies have an intensity of memory that places them, together with the Nazi concentration camps, at the pinnacle of people’s cruelty to one another.4 Even though some have been founded in the twenty-first century, penal institutions in the Russian Federation carry forward elements of a penal culture forged in the Stalinist gulag. These inheritances include a distinctive prison subculture organized around the so-called thieves-in-law (or ‘criminal elite’); the physical structuring of prison space, with its zoning and barrack-like accommodation; and a system of ‘prefects’ recruited by the administration as part of its system of disciplinary control and a militarized vocabulary. The lack of research on women’s colonies has allowed the perpetuation of a series of myths about the society of women prisoners. Most common among these is the myth of the detachment as a ‘large family’. We were told countless times by personnel that the detachment provides the context for the development of ‘typically female’ cooperation and ‘horizontal’ social interaction; evidence of the truth of these assertions is to be found in the greater compliance to the regime and lesser incidence of rule violation in women’s colonies compared with men’s. Table 10.1’s presentation of the results of the 2009 census seems to confirm the more positive attitude of women towards the regime than men.5 These results are reassuring for penal agents working with models of female cooperativeness, but they cannot pick up on the more subtle processes in prisoner society and forms of non-compliance that Ben Crewe, using concepts developed in relation to subaltern societies by James Scott, has identified as ‘backstage resistances’.6 Prisoners, like other subordinate classes, cannot risk the open resistance of the ‘public transcript’, relying instead on ‘everyday forms’ of opposition to the dominant power. Unfortunately, the constraints surrounding our fieldwork meant that we could not make the observations and have the sort of conversations that would reveal to us the existence, and content, of prisoners’ ‘hidden transcripts’. However, our conversations did suggest that the comfortable and comforting picture of compliant women in Russian colonies is in need of revision. We ascertained the following: that social relationships in women’s colonies are complex and layered; that a hierarchical social structure based on criminal biographies of

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Table 10.1. Compliance and resistance among men and women prisoners according to the 2009 FSIN census Number of occurrences of prisoners being in receipt of either commendation or punishment in census year

Distribution (in percentages) of sample populations Commendations Women

0 1 2–5 >5 General behaviour (in relation to the regime) Positive Neutral Negative Extremely negative Total

Men

59.1 57.7 17.6 23.6 22.2 18.1 17.1 0.6 100.0 100.0 Women 43.6 43.5 12.0 0.9 100.0

Punishments Women

Men

66.3 79.0 15.8 13.5 14.7 7.9 2.6 0.6 100.0 100.0 Men 37.2 37.9 21.8 3.1 100.0

Source: Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), pp. 73–5. The figures relate to 1 in 2 of the women and 1 in 10 of the men serving prison sentences on 12–18 November 2009.

prisoners are, indeed, absent from women’s colonies but that patterns of domination and subordination do exist; that penal power is contested in women prisoners’ adaptation to alternative foci of power and in subversive behaviours that undermine the officially prescribed social order; and, finally, that officially-sanctioned hierarchies and informal social groups interact in complicated ways to produce a society that is prone to suspicion and lack of trust. In Chapter 5 we introduced the idea of ‘enhanced panopticism’ as a disciplinary mode in Russian penal colonies, but doubted its centrality to maintenance of control. The evidence we present in this chapter revises, somewhat, that position, but not decisively. Finally, we should stress that we understand the patterns of social relationships we describe in the sections that follow primarily as artefacts of the Russian correctional colony, not as telling us something about women’s essential nature.

Building small social groups in women’s colonies: ‘families’ and ‘loaf sharers’ The communal living arrangements of the detachment provide the context for the formation of small social groups as the lowest layer of social organization in women’s correctional colonies. The members of these groups, which typically consist of 2–8 women, are referred to in prison jargon by a variety of terms, of which odnokhlebniki (loaf sharers) or semeinitsi (family members) are the most common.

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The tendency of inmates in total institutions to appropriate a portion of communal social space as ‘their own’ in order to provide themselves with reciprocal emotional support was first posited by Erving Goffman and has been confirmed in studies of the social arrangements in the barracks of prisoner-ofwar and Nazi concentration camps and in men’s correctional colonies in Russia.7 Our interviews with prisoners suggest that most co-detachment members tend to be viewed as ‘others’, to which the formation of small social groups is a response that provides women with emotional support and help in policing personal space. In talking about the small circle of women with whom they develop relationships, our respondents often described feelings that in any other situation would be captured by the signifier ‘friendship’. But it is equally true that at the same time they conveyed feelings of vulnerability stemming from a widely held conviction that every woman was necessarily out for herself. Small social groups in women’s colonies are inherently unstable, and the interpersonal relationships around which small social groups coalesce can only ever partially satisfy women prisoners’ need for empathy and understanding, to trust and be trusted. The women below, in different ways, express the combination of need and suspicion that characterizes relationships between people in captivity: First, there’s fear of being alone, and secondly, it’s just easier to be together with someone; that’s how I explain it. It’s a material thing, it’s easier as a twosome. It’s better to eat together in a two or threesomes – today at your place, tomorrow at mine – that sort of thing. (Ex-Pr 11) I had a friend and there were some girls I hung out with. But it didn’t mean anything. I didn’t trust anyone. I understood that there were people who wouldn’t betray me, who would nod their heads, smile, give advice. But I would never trust anyone. (Ex-Pr 15) Of course, people’s relationships [can be a problem]. Someone puts her trust in someone when she shouldn’t. Someone opens up and gets an unexpected punch. Someone is expecting something from you and you, in all conscience, can’t give it to her, and so that’s bad for her. Again it’s all easy to understand – we all live together but at the same time we’re apart, everyone is separate. You don’t have friends here. (Pr 57)

Notwithstanding such anxieties, small social groups are omnipresent in the colonies. Sometimes they are formalized in the performance of stereotypical gender (husband–wife) and family (grandmother–mother–daughter) roles, but this is not essential. The label ‘family’ is used loosely by women to denote a group with shared interests who maintain boundaries against outsiders. In her conversations with prisoners, Al’pern identified receipt of parcels as the main factor determining group membership and their status: women who receive parcels sticking together and barring entry to women without outside contacts.8 We also found that parcel receipt is important in group membership, but that small social groups coalesced around other shared interests as well: having same-aged children, working together, and assisting in the church topped the list. Age plays out in different ways: older women often act as mentors for the less experienced, adopting a younger woman as ‘daughter’, but age also can separate women.

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There are well-developed rituals that are used to signal and patrol group boundaries in which food and drink play a central role: There’s this ritual, if you can call it that. Coffee is boiled in a mug and then it is passed round so each has two gulps from it. I was surprised when I first saw this myself. It was when I was in the cell in the Sizo. It was the birthday of one of the women’s son and she says, ‘now we will drink coffee’, and she made just one mug. I think to myself, ‘this is strange’. She drinks and then offers it to the others: ‘now we will drink coffee’. I look from the sidelines and see that each takes two gulps. And, you know, you start to do it yourself. For example, now when we’re at work we also boil a mug of coffee. It’s already a habit with me, and I offer it to my circle. (Ex-Pr 1)

Drinking from the same mug, as described by this respondent, is the most obvious way of signalling group membership; but there are other rituals that prisoners understand as ‘signs of interest’ (znaki vnimaniia) that might lead on to closer friendship and, in some cases, to a sexual relationship. These include the exchange of postcards, letters and notes, invitations to play backgammon, ‘meeting’ and ‘escorting’ one another: I do make friends. You know the woman in the bunk next to me, she has a son Andrusha, an attractive boy, a very good boy. We have established a fixed order of doing things: she always brings me the latest photo she has received from home before showing it to other people. And I do the same with photos of Dina . . . That’s the sort of relationship it is . . . She works until 6, whilst my shift goes on until 8. She meets me from the factory, she boils water for me to wash in, carries my bags, and stays close by me. (Pr 34)

The prisoner continued to explain that her companion helps to guard her personal space in the dormitory. Mutual protection was a theme to surface in the women’s talk about their friendships; group members or the special friend would ‘keep other people away’, ‘put a stop to gossip’, and ‘stop others from causing trouble’. This suggests that some women adopt leadership roles in small groups.

Love or sexual exchange The small acts of kindness, such as showing an interest in another’s child and fetching hot water, are all examples of female intimacy. In some cases, this intimacy is expressed in a sexual relationship. The literature on women prisoners’ sexuality in other jurisdictions has shown the motivations for lesbian relationships to be complex, and research has focused on issues of class and race and on sex as a site for contesting penal authority.9 Inmates’ sexual relationships are quintessentially a manifestation of the nexus of space—power—body in prisons. We have already seen in the previous two chapters how in Russian colonies heterosexual relationships are reinforced by the provision of space in the visitors’ suites for conjugal visits, with access denied to any but legal partners of the opposite sex; and in a later chapter we will see how colonies attempt in multiple other ways to construct a feminine identity for prisoners that is alluring to men. In part, these

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attempts to feminize women prisoners are a response to what appears to be moral panic among penal agents, shared by society at large, about same-sex relationships. Thus, when the colonies enforce the provisions in the criminal correction code prohibiting lesbian relations between prisoners, they do this not just because it is a rule violation, but because they understand same-sex relationships as a deviant behaviour that offends against societal norms. This is demonstrated in the words of a chief prison psychologist: PSYCHOLOGIST: Lesbianism here, in my view, is part dissoluteness and part curiosity. It comes from the permissiveness in our society and from democracy. INTERVIEWER: But there were lesbians in Soviet times too. PSYCHOLOGIST: Yes, yes, of course, but that was just curiosity. INTERVIEWER: So who is most likely to be curious in this way? PSYCHOLOGIST: The sort of people who want to demonstrate to the world that ‘look, I can do it too’, that sort of showing off. That’s my view. It’s a sort of pastime. INTERVIEWER: But probably it has something to do with being in the colony, perhaps it exaggerates the tendency? PSYCHOLOGIST: Of course, and it’s probably like that in men’s colonies also. Just like in men’s. I think it is wrong. We need to change things in society at large, most probably. Yes, probably we need to change something in society. Otherwise it’ll just grow.

Colonies seem to vary in how far they try to suppress lesbianism: our prisoner respondents confirmed that a spell in a punishment cell was not unusual, nor was relocation to a different detachment. In one colony, pictures of ‘lesbian violators’ were displayed on the external colony fence so that visiting relatives could ‘learn the truth’ about their loved ones. But we were also told about personnel turning a blind eye to sexual relationships or differentiating their approach (for example, the strictest policing was reserved for the young who could be ‘saved’, older women being considered already a lost cause). And whilst, on the record, few personnel would sanction same-sex relationships, some told us of particular couples who appeared ‘really to love one another’. One, for example, spoke sympathetically about a former inmate who used to come and stand on the hill above IK2 in Mordoviia to look down into the colony to catch a glimpse of her lover, whom she was not permitted to visit. The official explanation for sexual relationships among women prisoners is that it is ‘situational’—an artefact of imprisonment, and a temporary phenomenon. Thus, we learned that it was the result of ‘experimentation’, ‘lifestyle’, and women’s longing for ‘intimacy, love, and certain warmth’ that they are deprived of in prison, and the absence of men. But we also had hints from the interviews with personnel that it could be ‘predatory’, especially on the part of older long-term prisoners, and that some women had a ‘pathological inclination’ for lesbian sex.10 But all those who were prepared to discuss the issue agreed that lesbianism is widespread in colonies and one of the most ‘intractable problems’ of the disciplinary order.

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The truism that sex in penal institutions is not a private activity applies in obvious ways to the communal dormitories of Russian correctional colonies. Life ‘in the crowd’ means that prisoners are perpetually subject to the voyeuristic gaze of personnel and other prisoners. Given the sanctions that can follow from disclosure, persistence with a relationship can be understood as a challenge to the disciplinary bio-power of the colony. This can be both direct and indirect as the following two cases show. The first was told us by a former prisoner who was imprisoned for six years; in the last two years she developed a lesbian relationship with another prisoner that she maintained after her release. In this extract she is seen challenging the official hierarchical order of penal power when she is called to the colony boss to explain her sexual relationship: I go to the detachment leader and I say to him, ‘Explain to me, there’s something I haven’t understood. I do understand that the correction department has a role in my personal life. Of course, this is of interest to it. But tell me, please, what business is it of the head of the colony? He seems to be interested. He’s been calling me to see him all the time, subjecting me to such questioning, almost about what position we do it in. I’m really surprised about this.’ I ask, ‘Why is this of interest to him? We’re not doing anything new; watch a porn video and you’ll understand. Nothing new, we’ve not thought up any novelties. (Ex-Pr 17)

We cannot verify that these words were, indeed, uttered, but even if they were not they indicate that prisoners understand sexual relationships as a challenge to the hierarchical, male power of the penal colony. More often the challenge is indirect, and can be understood as an attempt to reclaim agency by prisoners over decisions about their own bodies. In the second extract, another former prisoner explains that sexual relationships can help remind women of their humanity: When a woman lives with another woman [in the colony], it seems to me it’s because it makes life bearable . . . It is the one thing that helps you get through it and remain human; if you have someone close to think about, you don’t just think about yourself all the time. In this way, you remain yourself and you live, rather than just survive. (Ex-Pr 24)

Among prisoners there was a consensus that there is a distinction between relationships that involve ‘real feelings’, which all but the principled critics understood as answering women’s need for intimacy, and those that are transactional and based on erotic sex. Approval was reserved for types of relationships that spoke to discourses about women’s gentleness, where sexual relationships are secondary to the pursuit of emotional support. The former prisoners who had had lesbian relationships in the colony were all insistent that theirs was not about physical need: ‘For me, it was the spiritual relationship that was most important to start with, and then it became physical . . . there aren’t many couples like this’ (Ex-Pr 2). Established couples are known as pairs (pary) or half-and-halves (poloviniki) or mutuals (vzaimiki). But most women spoke of the lack of stability in sexual relationships, the use of sex instrumentally, and as a ‘survival strategy’. The gender order in women’s colonies is complex and confused. Male partners and fathers rarely visit women in prison and, while the top administrative positions

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in colonies are typically occupied by men (the governor, head of the operations and internal security departments, and the production zone chief), personnel in daily contact with prisoners are, more often, women. But there are ‘male’ inmates in women’s colonies: the women who construct a masculine identity for themselves. They have short hair and dress like men, develop a male gait, prefer not to shower with the other women, and try to get male jobs around the colony as electricians and plumbers. They are known in prison jargon as ‘real guys’ (nastoiashchie patsani). In the prisoners’ retrospective narratives, the decision of women to represent themselves as ‘real guys’ is viewed with scepticism; prostitutes, who on the outside have ‘long hair and short skirts’, we were told, cut their hair as soon they arrive at the colony in order ‘to live more easily’ by being looked after by resident lesbians—typically long-term prisoners. Despite distancing their own sexual relationships from those involving women acting out heterosexual gender roles, our interview partners often spoke about the ‘true guys’ with some affection. The patsani are leading characters in what Elena Omel’chenko has described as the ‘soap opera’ of on–off colony affairs in which fear of being discovered coexists with open demonstrations of love and affection; physical intimacy coexists with physical abuse; and vows of faithfulness and mutual support coexist with adultery and treachery.11 But it is a soap opera that has real heroes and real victims. One former prisoner who was serving a six-anda-half-year sentence for drug offences described dropping a woman with whom she had been having a relationship when she fell for another: War broke out, of course. Everything began in the October and it took until the New Year before we were together. It would have been better without all the fuss. There was a real war for several months. Well, I didn’t fight – she fought me. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t need to. That other girl – she realized she couldn’t do anything [to stop the romance] so out of weakness she began to create all sorts of trouble with the result that [my new lover] was moved to the 5th detachment. (Ex-Pr 1)

The prison authorities chose to intervene in this woman’s love triangle. But, as some personnel were prepared to admit, such attempts to control the prisoner’s sexual relations normally fail, and our interview partners confirmed that women who are motivated to have sex usually find a way to achieve that end, even if separated. Meanwhile, by penalizing sex, the authorities may well be placing a higher premium on sexual relations: either on the ‘prohibited pleasure’ principle, or, as we have already suggested, as an act of non-compliance. We found both possible explanations for how our respondents reacted to official interventions in their sexual encounters. There is no single narrative of lesbian sex in women’s correctional colonies, and our materials took us no further along the path of resolving either the ‘situational’ versus ‘natural’, or ‘coerced’ versus ‘consensual’ debates that have figured in studies of sexuality in prison.12 And we are aware of the ‘missing narrative’ of prison authority versus prisoner sex. We can conclude, however, that sexual relationships are part of the dynamic shaping the social and informal power structure of the ‘little society’ of the detachment and dormitory.

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Larger associative groups Where colony authorities are concerned, the formal structures of the detachment, brigade, and collective constitute sufficient framework for prisoners’ social life. As prison officers insist, these are particularly suited to women since ‘women prefer the collective life’. Inter-detachment competitions, in everything from housekeeping to variety shows, are the order of the day and women are encouraged to take pride in successes achieved. The evidence from women prisoners’ talk—how they referred to ‘our girl’ who did well in the colony beauty competition or how ‘we’ won a medal for the tidiest dormitory—is that the prisoners do indeed identify with the formal collectivities. But this is only to be expected since ‘collective’ competition has for decades been an integral part of the performance of good citizenship in Russia. In addition to the formal groupings, however, there are other large associative groups with which women identify in the colony. Given the large radius from which prisoners are drawn, we were interested in whether geographical background was a basis for group identification. History suggests that it should be, since zemliachestvo—coming from the same place—formed the basis of mutual support in the great waves of peasant migrations in the nineteenth century. At that time the term was applied to the way in which peasants from the same village or district would live together in the new setting of the town, the front, or Siberia. Oleinik found zemliachestvo a basis for group identities in the men’s correctional colonies he studied.13 Among women prisoners we found that common geographical origin played a rather weak role in the formation of small social groups and the choice of sexual partners, but it was significant in the formation of larger associative groups. Women from the same region would help one another with practical matters, such as writing an application for early release and settling in newcomers, and they would exchange news from home. A critical mass of potential members of a group has to be present for zemliachestvo or an analogous identifier to give rise to the emergence of a group. In L’govo juvenile colony, the large number of girls from Moscow meant that they had a ‘presence’ in the colony. The Muscovites represented themselves as more worldly-wise than the other girls, in this respect bringing into the colony prejudices of the broader society, but in another colony there were smaller numbers and they were distributed between detachments so did not form an identifiable group. In some adult colonies, women from the European north—Murmansk, Arhkangel’sk, and Komi—have a strong presence and, according to personnel, form a distinctive group who ‘keep their own house’ (osobniak): INTERVIEWER: So the Komis keep their own house? OFFICER: Well, in the detachments, because there are now so many of them, well, they socialize with one another . . . like the gypsies, that sort of thing . . . I haven’t done a scientific analysis but if you take any detachment it’s the Komis who are breaking the rules more than those from Kaluga, Omsk, or Ivanovo.

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INTERVIEWER: So it seems that the Komis are a distinctive category in your colony? OFFICER: Well yes, that’s how it’s turned out. As soon as they started sending them here, from the end of ’96, beginning of ’97.

The psychologist from the same colony as the officer quoted above insisted that, compared with other prisoners, ‘northern women’ manifested ‘low intellectual capacity’, a degradation she attributed to perpetual drug use and their abuse as children. Prisoners from the colony recognized northern women as a distinctive group, but we did not find evidence that this translated into discriminatory attitudes. These, rather, were reserved for groups of women from the ‘near abroad’, especially Tadjiks, Uzbeks, and Gypsies. We gathered that it is common practice for colony administrations to try to separate these women so that they assimilate into ‘detachment society’, but evidently this policy does not meet with much success. There were no Central Asian women or Gypsies among our interviewees, but the other women’s talk was peppered with the ‘classic’ markers of discrimination, superiority, fear, and an inability to see beyond stereotypes: They [young Gypsy women] are still active in their own traditions and will steal to eat. They are not very pleasant, and they are just like their parents . . . If they want to be treated like royalty, they make sure they are . . . they have high status and they are cunning and clever. (Ex-Pr 5) I worked for two years of my sentence managing the detachment . . . [the Gypsies] were the worst behaved. We called them the rubbish (chepukhi) because they didn’t wash. (Ex-Pr 7) One woman I know [an Uzbek] arrived with 2 kilos of drugs. She strutted in here and was so cunning . . . in her long skirt. She was allowed to pray five times a day because she was a Muslim. (Ex-Pr 8)

These references to lack of hygiene and stealing in the first two extracts are the common markers of low status in the women’s colonies. Again, we found little evidence of open inter-group conflict at this higher level of association: disagreements, where they arose, largely concerned housekeeping matters that are the stuff of conflicts in detachments regardless of group identity—whether to keep the window open or closed at night, the allocation of bunks, not pulling one’s weight, and untidiness.

Interconnecting hierarchies Ask Russians what is special about ‘prison society’ and, invariably, they will refer to the vory-v-zakone, or the thieves-in-law, the ‘criminal elite’ that emerged in the Stalinist labour camps in the 1930s. The thieves-in-law form the common entry point for the analysis of Russian penal subcultures; so long, that is, that the object of interest is men’s colonies. Since no woman has ever been crowned a ‘vorovka’ (the Russian feminization of the word ‘thief ’), so the argument goes, women’s

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penal society cannot be understood by reference to the status hierarchies or rules of the dedovshchina (‘godfather culture’). This section discusses whether these are valid assumptions. We leave others to enquire whether the focus on the dedovshchina tells the whole story of sociality in men’s colonies.

High and low status prisoners: informal hierarchies in the colonies The thieves-in-law appeared in the criminal milieu of the labour camps in the 1930s, encouraged, according to some, by the OGPU/NKVD to terrorize the political prisoners. Living according to ‘the understanding’ (po poniatiem) and with strict rules of entry, the thieves’ subculture provided an alternative set of norms by which prisoners conducted their lives from those of the camp authorities. These included a refusal to cooperate with the authorities or to work, making contributions to a common fund (the obshchak), and eschewing marriage. In the post-World War II period, the thieves-in-law fragmented and had to endure successive campaigns against them, but despite these setbacks they persisted to the end of the Soviet period; then, moving out of the prisons, they were well-placed to take advantage of the opportunities that the market and breakdown of law and order on the collapse of the USSR presented for the development of racketeering and extortion.14 Today, the thieves-in-law are a sub-set of a broader criminal subculture whose membership includes women as well as men. In prisons, the traditional thieves subculture now competes with new tendencies: these include ‘modernizers’, who are interested in updating the old thieves law; and ‘cynics’, who reject any set of norms.15 These challenges to traditional subculture have resulted in a ‘watering down’ of ‘prison lore’. Nevertheless, in men’s colonies subcultures have emerged that are structured and called the same as in the past, with the blatnye and avtoritety (those with authority in the criminal fraternity) at the top, and marginal groups (homosexuals, informers, colony thieves) at the bottom.16 These categorizations have filtered through to women’s colonies. In conferring status, therefore, women prisoners use labels common in criminal subculture generally and order categories accordingly, even though the underlying principles for allocating women between them may be different. The effect, though, is the same: women newly arriving in a colony instantly understand that ‘every person has her own place’. Here one ex-prisoner describes the hierarchical ordering in her colony: The blatnye, they have such a position that they are always first. And God help you if you contradict them. They have every convenience, every comfort; they’ve ‘bought’ everyone – the militia and the other prisoners. They get this position mainly because they are people who have sentences of God-knows-how-long. For them the zone’s like home. Everyone knows who they are and understands the situation . . . but it isn’t just about how long they’ve been in prison. There are people with 20 years who are the lowest of the low; lately we’ve been calling them the gribi [the mushrooms]. Then there are the sherstianye [the woollies], people who

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just get on with it and don’t ally themselves with anyone. Nobody dictates anything to them but nor do they have any influence. (Ex-Pr 2)

Others placed prisoners into similar generic categories: the elite who lived well, various marginals who were exploited by the elites, and a ‘disengaged’ or autonomous group somewhere in the middle. However, there is no consistency in the explanations for how women are allocated between these categories, or of the values attached to them. Our respondent above contested the view of the ‘mushrooms’ lack of worth, insisting that they are ‘normal people’ with clear consciences. Some of the inconsistencies in the descriptions may reflect differences in the subject positions of interviewees, but it also has to do with a genuine ‘messiness’ of the ordering of women’s penal society, which seems not to constitute a linear hierarchy but rather a series of overlapping status hierarchies, some involving relationships of domination and subordination. These can both be informal (formed ‘from below’) and formal (built by the penal authorities). High status correlates closely with length of sentence or multiple sentences. Women fitting this category are called mnogokhody (from mnogo meaning many and khodit’ meaning to walk or go round which we have translated as ‘regulars’). Asked to comment on the fact that these women have often committed heinous crimes, one of our respondents justified respecting them thus: I guess it’s because such people have been in the zone such a long time, they’ve endured such long sentences. That’s probably why we respect them. They’re generally the 105-ers [from the article number of her offence]. They’ve killed someone, murdered, taken someone’s life. So probably you shouldn’t respect that, but there [in the zone] it does command respect. It’s probably more to do with the length of sentence. Because it’s really difficult to be there for so long . . . That’s what I think. It’s natural to respect them. (Ex – Pr 12)

Length of sentence, insofar as it often maps onto age, is not sufficient to confer status unless reinforced by other attributes, but these comments remind us that a feature of the women’s colonies is the mixing of prisoners serving sentences under very different articles. The authoritative position of a prisoner serving a 20-year sentence over a first offender with two years is only to be expected. The authority of these women can be benign: one pensioner serving a 19-year sentence told us how younger women would come to her for advice, which she loved to give; but in other cases, the authority of the regulars is underpinned by violence and exploitation: You see, there are some people who don’t behave normally, by which I mean that they feel themselves to be the boss. So that Lena can give Anna a slap for no reason other than that she has lived in the detachment a long time. (Pr 24) In order to assert myself, to avoid being, as they say, downtrodden, I became the leader of a ‘negative tendency’. So they moved me to another zone . . . (Pr 40)

Earlier we observed that degree of connectedness with the outside world, insofar as it determined the receipt of parcels, is important to small-group membership.

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Women who are in regular receipt of parcels are conferred high status: they are ‘popular and praised’ and courted to join small groups. Among ethnic minority groups, such as we described in the previous section, there are often high status women who, by virtue of their extended families on the outside, have access to licit and illicit goods. These women were able to draw on the resources of other members of their ethnic group to achieve group dominance. Access to material goods is used to secure other women’s compliance and labour: INTERVIEWEE: Parcels arrived about once a month . . . we had a system of having to be on duty for two hours—you either had to clean the toilets or the staircase, or stand or sit next to the telephone. So you could pay someone who never receives anything to do this for you, cigarettes or tea, or some other products. INTERVIEWER: And how did the administration view this? INTERVIEWEE: They didn’t mind. For them the most important thing was that the right number of people turned up, they just had to give their name. Most people doing duties were ‘hired’. (Ex-Pr 11)

Illicit goods are important in reinforcing informal hierarchies, and they may require the collaboration of prison officers. But, just as length of sentence is a necessary but not a sufficient condition in achieving high status, so receipt of parcels only works if it is combined with other ‘leadership attributes’. One respondent spoke of how low status prisoners in her colony were regularly forced to give up the content of their parcels to other women, and we learned earlier in Chapter 6 how the regulars in Sizo press-huts exploit younger women’s fear of them to gain access to heroin. In the informal hierarchy of women’s colonies, the lowest positions are occupied by much the same categories of people as in men’s colonies. They include women with perceived negative personal attributes—the krysy (rats), musorskie (rubbish), and stukachi (chatterers)—who, respectively, steal from other prisoners, have personal hygiene issues, or who inform; or they are women who occupy marginal positions in society at large, such as the homeless (bombzhi) and, as we have already seen, Gypsies (Tsgani). Personal hygiene had a prominent place in women’s narratives about low social status. Whilst in some colonies sanitary conditions are good, in others hot water is only sporadically available and there is a lack of sanitary products for menstruation. In such situations, the perception and solution of personal hygiene problems becomes an instrument of power: those women who are unable to access resources to maintain personal hygiene are publicly stigmatized. Occasionally violence is used against low status prisoners, such as when they are caught stealing or informing: INTERVIEWEE: Well let’s take the ‘rubbish’ and ‘rats’. Yes there was a system of punishment. So the rats would be shorn and shaved. It was natural. They did that in some places. INTERVIEWER: Shaved?

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INTERVIEWEE: . . . they’d shave their heads. Or sometimes they’d give a ‘special haircut’ . . . where I was, we didn’t shave. In my detachment we didn’t shave, we beat them up instead. They’d simply take them into the drying room and beat them up. INTERVIEWER: Serious beatings? INTERVIEWEE: Well, naturally they were serious. Although it was best not to leave bruises. (Ex-Pr 24)

Homeless women are particularly vulnerable to being used by higher status women to do duties around the colony. Effectively, they constitute a caste at the bottom of detachment society, their position reinforced by the prison authorities who, on grounds of incompetence and unreliability, deny them a job in the main production units. Rather, they are set to clean drains and clear snow and are first in line for toilet and pan cleaning in the unofficial detachment ‘labour market’. The homeless are called by various names, including in one colony the siniary or siniushki (‘women with rings under their eyes’ or ‘blurry eyes’), and are widely supposed to commit crimes in order to be sent down: It’s good for her here; the alternative is that she’ll freeze to death on the street, but this way she has white sheets and a toothbrush. She has just one tooth in charge of her whole mouth. They give her a toothbrush and toothpaste and she takes them and then finds someone to exchange them for a cigarette. Or if necessary she’ll clean all those toilets and pots for me when I’m on duty . . . (Ex-Pr 8)

Official hierarchies At various points, informal hierarchies articulate with authority structures put in place by prison administrations. In Chapter 5, we saw that self-organization collectives, made up from among the prisoners, are responsible for a diverse range of day-to-day functions in the detachment, each under a leader appointed by the administration. According to the 2009 FSIN census of prisoners, 33.3 per cent of women prisoners are active members of self-organization collectives (with an additional 16.1 per cent members inactive, and 50.6 per cent not members).17 Members of these collectives are known in prison slang as activists (aktvisti). Additionally, every detachment has a ‘head prefect’ (starshaia dneval’naia), who is responsible for the detachment when the prison officer in charge goes home at 5 p.m. Giving responsibilities to prisoners would seem to be the application of the philosophy of empowering women and helping them to learn to resolve issues among themselves. This is certainly how the prison personnel we interviewed see self-organization. But as we have had occasion to observe before, in Russia practice is everything. Our respondents’ accounts of self-organization were contradictory. For some, the system was understood as a surrogate form of officially-sanctioned bullying, or penal power exercised through women who were prepared to ‘sell out’ to the administration; women who became activists were beneath contempt and offended

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against ‘prison lore’. Others were more positive, insisting it was in everyone’s interest to have order in the detachment overseen by the women themselves, rather than by the penal authorities. Yet a third viewpoint charted a middle course, regretting that women were drawn into working for the administration but understanding why they should consent to this; for, as all our respondents insisted, the prospects for early release are considerably higher for activists than for rank-andfile prisoners. Prison personnel are confident that there are sufficient checks-andbalances in place to prevent the abuse of prefect positions. However, it appears that it is common for the administration to put long-term prisoners in responsible positions and to make ‘trouble-makers’ prefects for its ‘corrective effect’. The familiar ‘detachment as family’ trope was used to justify the practice and to explain why it wouldn’t work in men’s colonies: ‘There is something useful, maternal, about it; it’s like having to take responsibility for your children . . . Yes, for women it seems there is something to be gained from this. It doesn’t work like this for men. Men’s colonies don’t have anything like it; they wouldn’t even understand the principle’ (Colony Corrections Officer). The ‘activists’ among our interview sample were, indeed, prisoners on long sentences. A former prisoner in a head prefect position and in charge of an 80-person detachment confirmed the importance of length of sentence in performing leadership roles. Her own successor, she noted, had a seven-and-a-half-year sentence. She said that in all her time as a dneval’naia she had never experienced aggression from the prisoners under her, attributing this to her ‘moral strength’ and the use of psychological pressure, such as ostracizing non-compliers (Ex-Pr 7). Another woman in the head prefect role, who had served 10 years of an 18-year sentence when we interviewed her, similarly described what she understood to be a softlysoftly approach to maintaining order. She was proud of the orderliness of ‘her’ detachment and of the fact that her women spoke a ‘decibel more quietly’ than elsewhere in the colony. Asked how she achieved this, she replied: Well, I don’t beat them around the head . . . I simply talk to them. When they arrive, they see that everything is well organized and they try to adapt . . . There are situations when relationships gather a head, but I have 67 women and I can’t control them all. I do have my people who watch what goes on and come and say, ‘Auntie, this and that’s happening.’ Then I go and have a chat and I say, if you want to stay in this detachment you’d better keep out of my sight. Then they agree to give up what they are doing. (Pr 13)

For both these ‘prefects’, the system of inter-detachment competition was crucial in creating an atmosphere of compliance among the prisoners, since if one woman broke the rules it had a negative impact on ‘the whole collective’. Among the non-activist prisoners, ‘collective competition’ was not always experienced positively. Some spoke of being tormented by self-organization sections. For one, the ‘sanitary’ section was the chief culprit. In her colony, it would launch ‘raids’ at 10 o’clock at night forcing women to lie on their bunks or the floor under bunks; then bedside cupboards were inspected to make sure that all personal belongings and clothes had been put away. This prisoner despaired that

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these raids, and the inter-detachment competitions that were driving them, had been initiated by the prisoners themselves (Ex-Pr 2). Asked why she did not complain to the prison authorities, she described the feelings of powerlessness and fear created by the ‘self-renewing’ group of activists. Non-activist prisoners did not even complain among themselves for fear that a confidante might became an activist someday herself. This would seem to speak to the operation of the sort of ‘enhanced panopticism’ in the society of women prisoners that we discussed in Chapter 5, since it has the effect of fragmentation and separation; but much of what was described to us is underwritten by raw power-play in the artificial conditions of captivity, as women jostle to secure a dominant position vis-à-vis others. Research on the thieves-in-law and the shadow economy in Russia has shown how illicit networks can be predatory on formal structures.18 In women’s colonies the evidence we have from former prisoners is that high status can be used by women to achieve diverse ends by manipulating members of both informal and formal hierarchies. The power relations are complex between blatnye, prefects, activists, and the prison authorities who, after all, rely on the women to help maintain order in the detachment. We were told stories, largely second-hand, about powerful women preying on the weaknesses of individual prison officers or nonattested workers to bring prohibited goods, such as alcohol, perfume, drugs, or medicines, into the colony. And, if they were not the same person, a head prefect might have to work through the leader of an informal hierarchy to achieve compliance of subordinate members. Older prisoners, especially those who had experience of prisons before the USSR’s collapse, insist that the distinction between formal and informal hierarchies was much clearer in the past. Referencing the violation of the thieves’ code in their objections, they complain that the bosses—blatnye or krutie—have themselves become activists, whilst prefects simultaneously ‘do the work of the administration’ and ‘fix things for themselves’. There was a tendency among this older group to look back to a golden age when prisoners complied with prison lore and would refuse to work for the authorities. In those days, they insisted, the lines between those who worked for the administration and those who resisted it were much clearer. The aspect of prison lore that all the ex-prisoner group of interviewees insisted should never be violated is informing on other prisoners; but all agreed that it was widespread and its incidence growing. Inevitably, the intelligence-gathering activities of colonies cannot be researched, but we understood from the former prisoner group that these involve general ‘fishing expeditions’—‘who smokes in the toilet at night, who cries’—as well as focused investigations in relation to particular events or individuals. Older prisoners blame the rise in the incidence of informing on the new, unprincipled generation of drug addicts ‘flooding the colonies’ who are determined to get early release and believe that working with the Operations service will help their cause. We were told that most informants are recruited from among low-status women, that they are well-known to other inmates, and that they

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can be the subject of retribution. It is for this reason that we are not comfortable assuming that informing necessarily has a ‘panoptic effect’.

Trust in women’s colonies ‘All women’s zones are red and much redder than any men’s zone could be.’ (Ex-Pr 2)

Russian correctional colonies are popularly supposed to fall into one of two types according to the balance of power between the prisoners and the prison authorities: ‘black (chernie) colonies’ are those where the prisoner subculture is dominant, and ‘red (krasnie) colonies’ are those where power rests with the authorities. In the ‘nostalgia narratives’ of the ex-prisoners we interviewed, the arrival of a new contingent of prisoners—young drug addicts unaware of prison lore—who are prepared to work with the administration has helped to consolidate penal power in women’s colonies, turning them all ‘red’. It is obviously a crude categorization. Oleinik developed a more nuanced discussion of the black/red binary on the basis of the men’s colonies he studied, reformulating it to take account of differences in the balance between interpersonal trust (the degree of trust between prisoners) and institutional trust (prisoners’ trust in the prison authorities). ‘Trust’ in both cases refers to the degree of confidence prisoners have in the relevant authority—subcultural or official—to keep them safe and to treat them fairly, according to the rules. In Oleinik’s reformulation, red colonies would describe a situation where there is a high level of institutional trust and low level of interpersonal trust, and black colonies where there is a high level of interpersonal trust and low level of institutional trust.19 But he identified two other states: first, where interpersonal and institutional trust are both low and there is an ever present danger of bezpredel (anarchy or out-of-control violence); and secondly, where there are high levels of both institutional and interpersonal trust, where social tension is low and the authorities are in light-touch control.20 The second of these two additional categories would describe a prison, in Liebling’s conceptualization, of ‘high moral performance’, that from the prisoner’s point of view, would be associated with ‘social comfort’.21 In Table 10.2 we reproduce a modified version of Oleinik’s diagram, which shows that only two of the men’s colonies he investigated had the ‘socially optimum’ situation where there is a high level of both institutional and interpersonal trust. Research by Antonian and Kolishchnitsyna confirm that criminal subculture embraces practically all men’s colonies and that, as a consequence, they are breeding grounds for corruption and prisoner-on-prisoner violence.22 The relative absence of violence in women’s penal colonies in Russia would suggest high levels of institutional and interpersonal trust or disciplinary control. Prison personnel we interviewed certainly would want to place their colonies in the top left-hand corner of Oleinik’s diagram. The results of the questionnaire

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Table 10.2. Trust in men’s correctional colonies Level of interpersonal trust

High Level of institutional trust

Low

High

Low

Low level of social tension; the administration controls the situation (9.5%) Black prisons, a clandestine life is flourishing, social control by prisoners’ leaders (43.0%)

Red prisons, minute and omnipresent control by the administration (28.5%) High level of social tension, risk of bespredel (that is, uncontrolled violence on the part of inmates or administration) (19.0%)

(After Oleinik, A. N., Organized Crime, Prison, and Post-Soviet Societies (Ashgate: Farnham, 2003), p. 115. The figures in brackets relate to the colonies Oleinik investigated.

surveys conducted in two adult colonies in Mordoviia and Novyi Oskol juvenile colony indicate that, in fact, personnel overestimate prisoners’ trust in them. However, it is important to acknowledge that the questions we asked are an imperfect measure of a sentiment as complex as ‘trust’. In the survey in IK2 and IK14 in Mordoviia, women were asked to indicate to whom they would turn for help from a list of people in the colony, and whether there was another prisoner whose advice they would listen to. The results, in Table 10.3, show that for the first question ‘other prisoners’ received the most hits, ahead of the various penal personnel with whom the women are in contact. There are differences between prisoners, however: repeat and longer-term prisoners show a lower general level of trust both of penal personnel and other prisoners than first-time prisoners and ‘recent’ arrivals. Prisoners who had served more than two years of their sentence showed the lowest levels both of interpersonal and institutional trust, suggesting that the adaptation process involves learning how to differentiate between who is trustworthy and who is not.23 The mixed picture for personnel in the survey results is confirmed by the interviews with former and current prisoners. Juvenile prisoners were more generally trusting than adults, and were positive about colony personnel, although with some exceptions. Typically, in talking about personnel, adult prisoners lighted upon the personal attributes, character, or motivations of individuals who stood out from the general mass in either a positive or negative way. Thus, we were told of officers who treated prisoners with respect: We had a friendly detachment, I liked it. The head of the colony was the same; she wouldn’t allow the personnel to smoke in front of the prisoners. She wouldn’t allow any swearing either, that is, she wouldn’t allow anyone in the administration to be rude. It was always ‘if you would, please . . .’ that’s how they spoke to us. And it’s natural that if they are polite to you, you are polite back. (Pr 60)

But we were also told of women and men officers who were sadistic: for example, making prisoners leave their bunks and assemble in the snow for roll call

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Table 10.3. The people to whom prisoners would turn if they needed help, according to Mordoviia survey results. Answers to question: ‘To whom do you first turn for help when you have a problem?’

Colony personnel and prisoners: Administration (e.g. otriad leader) Psychologist Social worker Friend Authority figure among prisoners No answer Avg. no. answers per prisoner

Categories of prisoner (according to length of sentence served and whether it is the first or subsequent offence) All First Previous Prisoner Prisoner served prisoners conviction conviction served under more than N= 144 N= 90 N=54 2 yrs N= 62 2 yrs N=82 Percentage of responses from each population sample

34.0

26.6

44.4

43.5

26.8

25.7 5.5 49.3 2.0

26.6 6.6 54.4 2.2

20.4 3.7 40.7 1.8

29.0 9.7 64.5 1.6

22.0 2.4 39.0 2.4

9.7 1.2

15.5 1.2

0.0 1.1

6.4 1.5

13.4 0.9

Source: our own survey data, 2007

even if they were unwell; who would report prisoners for minor violations, victimize particular individuals, use insulting language; who were corrupt, had sexual relations with the prisoners, and exploited them in other ways. Prisoners had a generally negative view of the nature of prison work and of the people who were drawn to it: INTERVIEWEE: From my experience, there are not many personnel with a ‘soul’. There is, of course ‘E L’ who does have some empathy towards people . . . but the general mass of personnel, they aren’t so much a ‘grey mass’ [what the peasants were called before the revolution] as a ‘green mass’, behaving like shop assistants selling chewing gum and chocolate . . . They are completely indifferent to who we are. INTERVIEWER: So that means you think that they shouldn’t be indifferent to you? Interviewee: I think a drop of humanity and soul wouldn’t hurt anyone. It’s just that you think, my goodness, if this person is like this at work, what on earth are they like at home? (Pr 40) Basically, you have to be negative about them. Of course, the psychologists try their best, they work hard and they are the younger generation. But they are the minority. The remainder – you can only be negative; they pick on people who can’t answer back. It’s terrible. And all the others stay silent, it’s not their business, as if it’s all going on in the house next door and you can just hear it through the window. (Pr 57)

These differences speak to variations between colonies of the sort that Liebling found between the prisons she investigated in the UK. If a conclusion has emerged

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from our analysis, it is that the same criteria cannot be used to evaluate what constitutes a ‘socially optimum’ experience of prison for women and for men. The relative absence of violence in women’s colonies is obviously a ‘plus’, but we came to the conclusion that this could just as well indicate a situation in which the authorities maintain ‘omnipresent control’ in an atmosphere of generalized suspicion, as the existence of a high degree of institutional and interpersonal trust. We were not in a position to verify our respondents’ various reports of the abuse of the prefect system and the information-gathering activities of the security departments; but that these beliefs were sincerely held by them is not in question. And in the context of an 80-year-long history in which the stukach’, or stool pigeon, became a fact of everyday life in Russia, the inclination on the part of women prisoners to believe the worst is understandable. Nicola Hutson and Carrie-Anne Myers, in their essay on young women offenders in the UK, have observed that being able to talk to someone from ‘the out’ is fundamental to building their confidence to seek and accept help: ‘Counselling had to be the right sort, from the right person, in order to be effective.’24 The truth is that most of the women we interviewed, when asked whom they trusted, named their mother or someone else not associated with the penal colony. We will address the question of whether counselling on offer in Russian women’s colonies is of the right sort and by the right person in the next chapter, but here we pause on Hutson and Myers’ observation to note again that Russia is severely wanting when it comes to facilitating contacts between prisoners and people from outside. The location of penal colonies far from the metropolitan centres means that people genuinely from ‘the out’ are in short supply. Instead, as we have seen above, women prisoners have no choice but to look for their principal social relationships among the 50–100 women with whom they share their sleep, work, and recreation, whilst the people with whom they have regular contact from ‘the out’—the prison guards, officers, and non-attested workers—come from a milieu steeped in a penal history reaching back to Soviet times.

Notes 1. Crewe, B., The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009); Harvey, J., Young Men in Prison, Surviving and Adapting to Prison Life (Willan: Cullompton, 2009). 2. Liebling, A., Prisons and their Moral Performance. A Study of Values, Quality and Prison Life (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004), p. 463. 3. Except see Bosworth, M., Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons (Ashgate Dartmouth: Farnham, 1999) and Al’pern, L., Zhenshchiny i Deti v Rossiiskoi Tiur’me. Sbornik Materialov (TsSRUP, Moscow, 2001). 4. Rock, quoted in Liebling, op. cit, p. 171. 5. The table records the number of official commendations for good behaviour awarded to prisoners in the census year (these include prizes, money, and extra privileges) and the number of punishments from a formal warning to detention in the isolation cells, according to articles 114 and 115 of the criminal correction code.

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6. Crewe, B., ‘Adaptation and resistance in a late modern men’s prison’, British Journal of Criminology, 4 (2007), pp. 256–75. The relevant work of James Scott he uses is Scott, J. C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1992). 7. Goffman, E., Asylums: The Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1968). On Russian colonies, see Oleinik, A. N., Organised Crime, Prison and PostSoviet Society (Ashgate: Farnham, 2003), pp. 124–30. There are many survivors’ testimonies of the gulag, holocaust, internment and POW camps that describe the arrangement in barracks: Ginzburg, E., Into the Whirlwind (Collins: London, 1967); Solzhenitsyn, A., The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2 (Harvill/Collins: Glasgow, 1976); Levi, P., If This Is a Man (Abacus: Aldershot, 2003); Say, R. and Holland, N., Rosie’s War. An Englishwoman’s Escape from Occupied France (Michael O’Mara Books: London, 2011). 8. Al’pern, op. cit., p. 29. 9. Kunzel, R., Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2008). For recent work on the representation of female sexuality in prisons, see Chesney-Lind, M. and Eliason, M., ‘From visible to incorrigible: the demonization of marginalized women and girls’, Crime, Media and Culture, 2/1 (2006), pp. 29–47; and on sexuality as a form of resistance, Bosworth, M., ‘Gender, race, and sexuality in prison’, in B. H. Zaitzow and J. Thomas (eds), Women in Prison: Gender and Social Control (Lynne Rienner: Boulder, 2003), pp. 137–54. 10. Research in the West has shown that lesbian sex is most widespread among long-term prisoners and recidivists. See Leger, R. G., ‘Lesbianism among women prisoners’, Criminal Justice and Behaviour, 14/4 (1987), pp. 448–67. 11. Omel’chenko, E. N., ‘Love or sexual exchange: gender relations in women’s correctional colonies’. Paper presented to workshop Gender, Geography and Punishment in Comparative Perspective, University of Oxford, 22–23 June 2010. 12. Hensley, C. and Tewksbury, R., ‘Inmate-to-inmate prison sexuality: a review of empirical studies’, Trauma, Violence, Abuse, 3/3 (2002), pp. 226–43 gives a review of empirical work on prisoner sexuality. 13. Oleinik, op. cit., pp. 124–5. 14. Slade, G., Mafia and Anti-Mafia in the Republic of Georgia: Criminal Resilience and Adaptation Since the Collapse of Communism, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2011; Varese, F., The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in the New Market Economy (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001). 15. Antonian, Iu. M. and Kolyshchnitsyna, E. N., Motivatsiia povedeniia osuzhdennykh: monografiia (Unity: Moscow, 2009), p. 49. 16. In their sample of 567 prisoners, only 3.2 per cent of first-time prisoners and none who had served sentences before said they were prepared to disobey subculture rules; see Antonian and Kolyshchnitsyna, op. cit., pp. 50–2. 17. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 72. The equivalent figures for men are 21.8 per cent ‘active’ members, 15.6 per cent ‘sleeping’ members, 62.6 per cent not members. 18. Ledeneva, A. V., Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998); Slade, op. cit., ch. 1. 19. Oleinik, op. cit., p. 115. 20. Ibid., p. 116. 21. Liebling, op. cit. 22. Antonian and Kolyshchnitsyna, op. cit., pp. 38–47. 23. The figures for the two colonies in Mordoviia are that 49.2 per cent of prisoners in their first 2 years of sentence said there wasn’t another prisoner whom they would go to with their problems; but 74 per cent who had served more than 2 years said there was such a person. 24. Hutson, N. and Myers, C.-A., ‘ “Bad girls” or “mad girls”—coping mechanisms of female young offenders’, in F. Heidensohn (ed.), Gender and Justice. New Concepts and Approaches (Willan: Cullompton, 2006), p. 161.

11 Rehabilitation as Emotion Therapy We give lectures on personal matters . . . not training as such because there are too many women but we conduct [psychometric] tests. There is a psychology programme that was implemented by the Norwegians here. We do a lot of sitting in circles and talking through various topics. (Social Worker: IK2, Yavas, 2007) We were all sat there in the circle: ten drug addicts and a grandmother who threw her grandson off a ten-storeyed building. (Pr 45, 2008)

In the next two chapters we examine the processes and practices that are organized around rehabilitation, further advancing the central thesis of this book, that there is a dynamic relationship between the geography of women’s imprisonment in the Russian Federation and penal practices occurring during confinement. Despite the various exceptional features of Russian prisons outlined in this book, there are respects in which Russian penality is not exceptional, particularly in relation to women offenders. As in most Western jurisdictions, women’s offending occurs less often than men’s, and the offences are less serious and involve fewer violent and dangerous acts. Yet, as in many other countries, women are committed to prison more and more. Our interviews with personnel show how in Russia understanding women’s offending transcends the boundary of looking at criminogenic need, and instead focuses on gender needs. To this extent Russia conforms to the global trend of viewing women offenders in a particular way— less aggressive, more emotional and needy than men—and this was a particularly strong finding from our work. The words of a senior officer in a correctional colony in Mordoviia illustrate a common sensibility across the majority of the personnel we interviewed: I think that women have similar physiological needs to men – no difference. But women are more emotional, so we see women investing their emotions in theatrical productions, aerobics, and ballroom dancing, or in quietly reading. Basically, what I am saying is that since women are ‘the guardians of the earth’, they tend to be more emotional than men.

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These words suggest that gender attitudes originating in the Soviet era still reside in the minds of some prison personnel. As we have already observed, changes since 1991 have been considerable in the areas of judicial reform, rights-based legal responses to crime, and procedural fairness in sentencing, and there is evidence that shows a shift towards reform of practices aimed at successful reentry and desistence from crime. However, when the geography of Russia’s penal system is taken into account, old-fashioned views and attitudes organized around sending women away ‘for their own good’ so that discipline and rehabilitation are better enabled indicate that Soviet discourses persist. Particular dispositions towards rehabilitation and re-entry take on a distinctive geographical form as a result of many colonies, including the so-called open prisons (kolonii-poseleniia), being located in communities dominated by the prison. This raises further questions about the extent to which prison influences the social experience beyond the wall. Below we briefly review Western scholarship on rehabilitation in prisons and we place these concerns in the Russian penal context as it relates to women prisoners. Before we do this, it is important to clarify a semantic point about the use of the term ‘rehabilitation’. In Russia, ‘rehabilitation’ is reserved for a very specific process begun with Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of the excesses of the Stalin period, and it refers to the restoration of civil rights to a person (or whole social group) wrongly convicted; the process continues to the present day, both with respect to victims of the gulag and to those who fell foul of the anti-Soviet agitation clauses in Soviet law after Stalin’s death. Where Western criminologists write about ‘rehabilitation’, Russians would employ the term ‘correction’ (ispravlenie) or ‘(re-)education’ ((pere)vospitanie) and, latterly, re-socialization (resotsializatsiia). Hence, the penal facilities where convicted prisoners are held are called ‘correctional’ colonies and the generic name vospitatel’, ‘(re-)educator’, is used for the various personnel, such as detachment leaders, who are responsible for managing prisoners. In what follows we use the word ‘rehabilitation’ in the Western sense. Research into prisoner rehabilitation has been gathered mainly from Western jurisdictions. The importance of this literature is well documented, but we see the scholarship as flawed in two key areas. First, it does not foreground the geographical considerations of place and distance that influence provisions towards the punishment and rehabilitation of women. Secondly, it sidelines prison communities in non-Western jurisdictions, a problem inherent in much criminological scholarship published today. It is worth recalling that, with nearly 62,000 women behind bars and numbers rising, women’s incarceration in the Russian Federation is not a trivial matter. In Russia, when the experiences of women prisoners are assessed, the transformative struggles in criminal justice culture to liberate penal ideology and practices from their Soviet past reveal an unusual rehabilitation discourse: a complex mix of Western models and Soviet idealizations of gender and social control.

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Key issues in prisoner rehabilitation in the West Criminological literature is rich in analyses and comparative accounts of the goals and aspirations of prisoner rehabilitation. One of the reigning paradigms of prisons in many European nations, prisoner rehabilitation has not only been a major academic concern for decades but is also viewed as an objective measure of whether prisons ‘work’, and when they do not whether that failure is due to the harmful impact prisons have on offenders. People commit crimes for many reasons, and prisons are not uniform places of detention. With longitudinal studies on the effects of imprisonment being few and far between, there is considerable debate about whether rehabilitation (with its presumption that a change in an offender’s behaviour is required) can reduce re-offending.1 Research consistently shows that whilst the social, psychological, and emotional effects of imprisonment do vary, prison is acutely painful and psychologically traumatic with damaging effects.2 Rehabilitation remains at the forefront of many penal systems, but, in the context of new penal governance narratives which are predicated on risk, probabilities, classification, and management, it is often argued that prisoner rehabilitation resembles little more than a utopian ideal.3 Criminologists remain perplexed by the question of ‘what works?’ This can be explained by the fact that prisons for over 200 years have provided security and safety for society, but at the same time have sought to achieve other, largely unattainable, goals. Alongside the managerialism that has surfaced over the last 20 years in the penal systems of the West, the simple and uncontested fact remains that many prisoners come to prison with varying levels of emotional, physical, and psychological problems.4 The recognition that individuals who offend have varied needs is not new, but when juxtaposed against the strategies and rationales of penal governance referred to by Kruttschnitt as a ‘prudentialized’ process, the task of caring about the humanity and the future lives of prisoners creates a tense coupling of custodial management concerns on the one hand, and the adoption of a humanitarian approach, on the other.5 Since the eighteenth century, prison systems in Western societies, through law, have been obligated to provide for rehabilitation through education and interventions aimed at deterrence. To varying degrees, the use of psychological approaches that operate on an individual level are employed. True rehabilitation, it has been argued, requires individual action towards making better choices: if prisoners can make better choices, they are less likely to re-offend.6 But rehabilitation in prisons is also highly political. Compelling accounts of the politicization of the rehabilitation project have shown how the rise of neo-liberal governance in the late 1970s triggered the demise of rehabilitation in prisons, creating in the USA ‘unparalleled carceral hyperinflation’.7 With notable shifts towards punishment, a dramatic fusion of rhetoric from the political right and left came to pass. The ‘left’ was disillusioned with rehabilitation as a workable and realizable strategy, and the ‘right’ insisted that prisoners were undeserving of any form of support and should

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be punished, for as long as possible, on the principle of ‘whatever it takes’. In the USA during the Nixon presidency, reaction against the protest movements and civic tolerance of the 1960s, coupled with calls to reduce the size of the welfare state, led to moral panics about criminality that resulted in massive prison building programmes and privatization. In the UK, this trend has occurred to some degree, with the watershed moment being former British Home Secretary Michael Howard’s infamous ‘Prison Works’ speech at the Conservative Party conference in 1993.8 In the UK the notable shift at this time was towards professionalizing the prison service to achieve value for money and prisons fit for purpose. That we have entered a new age of punitiveness has become the conventional wisdom among academics working in the field of prison studies in the UK and North America. The pioneering zeal of rehabilitation has changed into something quite different; as rehabilitation fell out of favour, it rose again as a complex amalgam, according to Garland, combining ‘. . . the liberal legalism of due process and proportionate punishment with a correctionalist commitment to rehabilitation, welfare and criminological expertise’.9 Garland’s message is clear and simple: the penal welfare complex has collapsed and a ‘culture of control’ characterized by rising incarceration rates, conservative politics, and a punitive turn in sentencing has risen to take its place. Moreover, if we place emphasis on the individual within these changes, it is ‘responsibilization’ that has replaced ‘rehabilitation’: the social and psychological expertise once central in many Western penal systems has given way to a rhetoric of ‘it’s up to the prisoner’. Thus, alongside austerity measures and expanding prison populations, assessment schemes and initiatives aimed at responding to prisoners’ criminogenic needs continue to operate.10 While the ‘punitive turn’ ebbs and flows to varying degrees across Western and English-speaking societies, administrators working inside prisons struggle to contain large groups of prisoners with inadequate resources and to address the wide range of personal needs of those held captive.11 It is notable that Garland excludes women from the discussion and commentary on the culture of control and the punitive turn that lie at its centre, although he is not alone in this.12 More urgently for our research is the continuing omission of a comparative dimension. The Russian Federation is a high imprisonment society with hundreds of thousands of prisoners languishing in penal establishments scattered across a territory encompassing one-fifth of the earth’s surface. One of the authors, nearly a decade ago, identified parallels between Western penality and the historical trajectory of imprisonment in Soviet Russia, and parallels have continued in the post-Soviet period.13 Since the USSR’s collapse in 1991 Russian prisons have changed, with this initially taking place by the importation, with breathtaking speed and openness, of the norms, values, legislation, and policy goals of the core European countries. But, in the longer term, Russia has evaded the neo-liberal political agendas that have swept across the European continent, in varying degrees first absorbed from the USA. The omission of a discussion of how Russia has resisted these agendas is surprising.

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Correction in Russia At the core of much prison policy and penal law in the Russian Federation since the USSR’s collapse has been the recognition of the human rights and legal status of prisoners. The rehabilitation of offenders has not, however, been ignored, with the underlying principle being that one role of prison is to correct the behaviours that led offenders to make bad choices. According to the criminal correctional code, the aim of ‘correction’ in the context of incarceration today is the formation in the prisoner of a ‘respectful attitude to other people, society, work, societal norms, rules and traditions, and raised educational and cultural standards’.14 Officially, these ends are delivered through the trajectories of work, formal education, self-organization, and professional training, all underpinned by a system of punishments and rewards. The ultimate prize for the prisoner is a positive recommendation from the colony for parole or UDO (Uslovno-dosrochnoe osvobozhdenie). Table 11.1, from the survey we conducted in IK2 and IK14, Mordoviia, shows the rate of participation of women prisoners in work and formal education, comparing these with the results of the FSIN census for 2009, where relevant statistics are available. The table shows a high participation rate for women in work. The statistics for education must be set against the low educational attainment of women when they enter the penal system: 33.1 per

Table 11.1. The participation of women incarcerated in IK2 and IK14 in Mordoviia in work and formal education, 2007 Participation in: I. Work

Percentage not working Percentage working Of which in: Clothing manufacture Agriculture Other (including as prefects and activists) Total II. Study Percentage not studying Percentage studying To 9th grade 9–11th grade Advanced Higher N=

Response rate as % (In brackets, FSIN 2009 census results)1 15.3 (39.6) 84.7 (60.4) 70.5 (65.9) 4.1 (4.3) 25.4 100.0 (100.0) Response rate as % 79.9 20.1 7.3 17.8 28.6 46.3 144.0

Source: our own survey in IK2 and IK14, Mordoviia, 2007 1

Kazakova, V.A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) (Iuris-prudentsiia: Moscow, 2001), pp. 65–6.

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cent are either illiterate or have not finished secondary education.15 For such women, attending school is compulsory. Higher and professional education is voluntary. FSIN makes much of the number of production enterprises, schools, and professional training centres it has in its colonies, but, in truth, the activities that take place in them are not welded into coherent programmes of ‘correction’ and ‘education’ targeted to the needs of individual prisoners. Indeed, in most cases correction would seem to be secondary, or a post-Soviet rationalization for the activity’s existence. For example, women’s work is recorded in 2009 as taking place in ‘Centres of Labour Adaptation’, but in reality these are the same workshops and factories that existed in Soviet times, involving just the same penal labour process; that is, labour is compulsory, it is predominantly in the textile industry (making uniforms for public sector workers), and is directed towards meeting purchase orders (true, now to help the colony to balance its books rather than to fulfil the five-year plan target). The women we interviewed were, generally, pleased to have work to do, not least because the wages helped them save towards release, buy presents for children, and make purchases in the colony shop. Some also saw it as giving them a skill that would be useful after release. However, when asked about the skills they would like to acquire, it was the tertiary and quaternary sector, not production, that received most frequent mentions: women prisoners wanted to learn to become sales assistants, cooks, and beauticians, in that order, with a small number wanting to gain professional qualifications in nursing, law, or computing. Professional education is often nothing more than teaching women to use sewing machines or cut out material; that is, the skills they need for penal production. This prisoner voiced her scepticism about the usefulness of the skills she was acquiring in the clothing plant: I work in the cutting workshop and we cut fabric. I am not sure if the skills are useful for my overall development. I do not know what I would recommend by way of something more useful. Everyone is an individual and is different. I do not know if there are girls in the colony who receive higher education or distance learning. I don’t know if any of them have ever been interested, but I do want to study more and study in an institute when I get home. (Pr 30)

By the same token, self-organization, represented by personnel as a responsibilization strategy, is an inheritance from the Soviet period and was set in place to get necessary jobs done around the colonies. All these activities may well have a rehabilitative effect on some women, but they are not part of a recognizable programme of rehabilitation. In short, much of what is reported as rehabilitation is far from this and represents an, admittedly somewhat ‘softened’, version of Soviet correction. Correction during the Soviet period relied upon a tough approach, punitively enforced, and ideologically abstract (because at its centre was a belief that all crime was anti-Soviet), and it destroyed millions of lives. ‘Socially useful labour’ was pivotal to correction, but in the gulag it ‘hypertrophied’ and became a system of forced labour applied to the fulfilment of the state’s industrialization plans. In Soviet prisons and the camps, ‘correction’ was organized around political oppression, social control, and a denial of myriad social, economic, and personal factors

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that lead to crime. An unprecedented amount of harm and pain, death and punishment was unleashed on the Russian people in the penal system from the early twentieth century until the collapse of the USSR in 1991. From the mid-1970s this included psychiatric ‘treatment’, when research in the notorious Serbskii Institute of Forensic Psychiatry became the basis for using psychiatric hospitals to break the mental health of political prisoners. Dissidents from diverse walks of life were incarcerated in psikhushki16 or psychiatric wards, but ‘ordinary criminals’ were treated in this way also.17 The illegitimate use of psychiatry ended with Communism’s collapse, but the stain it left spread outwards, affecting psychology and all areas of medicine concerned with the mind. Psychiatry is still used to determine whether defendants are legally sane to stand trial, but its role in the criminal justice field in Russia has improved significantly since 1991 with better monitoring and medical, legal, and ethical regulatory models to treatment entering the discipline.18 No doubt because of its troubled history, the penal service evidently has difficulty recruiting suitably trained psychiatrists with the result that medical back-up is not always available for psychologists working with troubled women. We were not given access to data relating to psychiatric illness and to patterns of self-harm among women, but evidence of the degree of understaffing may be gleaned from the fact that, according to the 2009 FSIN census, only 12.7 per cent of women prisoners use medical services in colonies, a figure that includes all types of illness.19 Psychological science, as it is referred to by personnel, is the current and most prevalent framework for developing the nearest thing Russia has to rehabilitation programmes for women offenders, its practices focusing on causal links between behaviour and possible addictions. Prison policy, albeit in an imprecise way, uses psychology as a metaphor or, at best, a guiding principle. It is organized around a loosely established set of ideas that surfaced in the penal system in the late 1990s borrowed from behavioural psychology, such as Eysenck.20 In our research, we came across unsupported theories and inexperienced ‘psychologists’ who were prison officers who had done ‘some psychology’ as part of their training. Russian penality has borrowed and modified imported norms and ideas regarding the causes and consequences of crime with speed and haste, with the result that it lacks an academic or professional evidence base from which to develop bottom-up penal policies. However, there are rights-based discourses and procedures designed to protect offenders at every stage of the criminal justice process, which are inspired by European standards, prison rules, and international law. The record of human rights violations and the universal condemnation of Soviet penal norms created an avalanche of debates and arguments throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. But even though prisoners began to be regarded as having agency by virtue of their rights, they were also portrayed in some criminal justice circles as being ‘ordinary criminals’ in need of correction. The latter point was exaggerated in the newly liberated mass media. Criminological discourse in the Russian Federation came to be premised on the conventional criminological wisdom of 1970s and early 1980s American prison psychology, with the result that

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the social context of crime was overlooked in favour of cognitive models that focus on the individual. In today’s Russia, we find that there is an imbalance between examining the ‘beyond the individual’ social and cultural context of crime and offending and the ‘residing in the individual’ dispositions towards offending, with the latter gaining increasing prominence. One of the personnel we interviewed, a prison social worker, captures well how the so-called golden era of prison labour as a mode of rehabilitation (the period 1920–89) has given way to something quite different: We always aimed for work, work, work but we have a lot of talented people who can sing and who can draw, and we need to focus on some of that talent. Women want something other than work, I feel.

Personnel explained that although awareness that the social and economic circumstances facing Russians today should be considered as valid background factors in understanding why some women commit crime, it is behaviour modification and the potentially harmful effects that crime has on women fulfilling their role as mothers and wives that should be the key drivers of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is a hugely contradictory process in Russian women’s colonies since it takes place in a militarized atmosphere and an environment of double isolation. We argue that geographical inertia has paved the way for historical attitudes and practices to flourish, leading to the emergence of an overarching penal principle for addressing women’s offending, which we describe as ‘emotion therapy’.

Emotion therapy in women’s colonies It is important to state from the outset that comparing prisoner rehabilitation in Russia with what is happening in Western prisons is highly problematic, because there are not many common spheres of action and ideas. Russian penality is wholly distinctive in key areas. Russia does not operate a National Probation Service, a Community Social Work Service, or Services Accreditation. Most Western penal systems operate national guidelines and specified requirements for risk assessment, sentence planning, and offender assessments (needs, health, employment, education backgrounds, and family relationships), all of which are commonly associated with the likelihood and probability of re-offending. The most effective way of working with prisoners, so goes the conventional penological wisdom, is to enhance the programmes targeting re-offending and to ensure meaningful programme integrity. For women offenders in UK prisons, the most frequent needs that feed into rehabilitation programmes are education, employability, training, relationships, and emotional well-being.21 All of these exist individually in Russian colonies, but, as we observed above, often their rehabilitative purpose is secondary, whilst the fact that they are compulsory diminishes their value. Where comparisons based on similarity can be made is with regard to criminogenic needs. However, there are obstacles to delivering effective programmes, including

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implementation and shifting cultural attitudes that require the production of a recognizably ‘Russian’, led-from-below, approach. With much of Russian penal doctrine a mishmash of imported norms and legal rules coupled with goals and aspirations harking back to the Soviet period, the task of developing a conceptual framework for rehabilitation that reflects Russian offenders’ criminogenic needs and problems becomes extremely difficult to administer and sustain. For women prisoners, especially, penal geography is constraining their ability to connect to the place of eventual return. Geographical considerations of distance and exclusion do not feature significantly in prison research in Russia. Personnel made assertions that women prisoners benefit from different kinds of interventions compared with male prisoners, but insisted that geography’s effects are not of primary importance. Imprisonment can impair and, in many cases, destroy social bonds, and it is often this that leads to re-offending and not the enduring character traits of the individual. Russian prison personnel in women’s colonies acknowledge the importance of the former, but official policy is to address the latter. However, we found no evidence of accreditation programmes affiliated to national guidelines, and were struck by the absence of effective resources that women offenders could access to help them reduce re-offending. Instead, the daily operation of what can loosely be described as rehabilitation in the penal colonies in our study is organized around addressing the problematic emotions and gender-based problems of women. Established discourse among prison officers is highly gendered, as in this from the senior psychologist in one colony: Men are not as emotional as women . . . I know a woman psychologist who when she was working with men – which can be very hard for a woman – would go to the surgery waiting room and there would be no one there . . . As soon as I start my analysis, I say to a woman: how are you emotionally and how are you coping and how are you adapting? With men, you need to improvise. They do not have the same ‘aesthetic’.

Personnel hark back to the Soviet model of perfect womanhood when, in addition to being good workers, ‘women were women’. To be responsive to rehabilitation, a prisoner must excel first at being a woman. The deputy governor of IK2 in Mordoviia, responding to a question about whether her career plan included becoming a colony boss (nachal’nik), explained her negative response thus: ‘a woman is, well . . . a woman! She is gentle, a mother, and lives for her family and her man. She is first and foremost a homemaker.’ It is towards societal norms that personnel look to explain crime and from which to harness rehabilitation. The methods used to assist women to rehabilitate reflect the belief in Russian prisons that women’s offending should be addressed by identifying emotional and psychological malaise. Psychological services have been enhanced in women’s colonies in the past decade and their tasks enumerated as: the assessment of new arrivals, helping women to adapt, evaluating individuals’ applications for early release and to work outside the colony, resolving interpersonal conflicts, preparing prisoners for release, and working with prisoners’ families.22 Psychologists

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told us that they spend much contact time with women, teaching them how to relax and be sociable. However, numbers mean that much ‘psychological education’ is delivered in the form of lectures and in group-therapy sessions. Also much time is taken up in psychometric testing and analysis, which begins as soon as a woman arrives in quarantine. We use computers . . . to do psychometric tests. We do have a lot of women interested in psychology and emotions, yes, a lot of women are into it and read the magazine ‘Psychologies’. They like it because it has tests and questionnaires to answer. I see it on the table in the canteen and I’ll join in the discussion. There’s a psychology newspaper in every detachment, and in each detachment a minimum of four women help out working on the psychology side of things. (Psychologist, IK2, Mordoviia, 2007)

The four women to whom the psychologist refers are the members of the ‘psychological self-organization sections’ in detachments made up of interested prisoners and tasked with organizing activities around co-prisoners’ psychological needs. Their activities include organizing lectures, group discussions, and circulating magazines. They take amateur psychology right into the heart of the prison body. Women’s colonies are saturated with ‘psychology’, which is performed in various spaces around the colony: the detachment, the large ‘psychology rooms’ for lectures and group discussions, private ‘psychology booths’, and on the external and internal walls of buildings–in the posters and murals conveying relevant messages. These latter might be a larger than life mural of a child holding its hand out under the caption ‘Mummy, I am waiting for you’, challenging scenes of the temptations associated with drugs, alcohol, and prostitution with advice on how these can be resisted, and images of famous figures from Russian psychological research. One prisoner regretted the large number of women drawn into the psychology network: It was hard to see so many girls use the psychology service there, but it was good that they had calming music and encouraged people to talk . . . The psychologist of course was a woman and everyone in the detachment would go to her and they would be tested constantly. (Ex-Pr 7)

Psychologists complained that there are too few of them to give the individual attention to prisoners that they would like, and the scarcity of opportunities for one-to-one sessions compared with group activities was commented upon by the prisoners: People talk about their problems and get advice, but we’re a great mass in a small colony. Sometimes I want to dig a grave and hide in it, but there’s nowhere even to do that here. There is a room you can visit [the psychology room] but it’s not private. (PR 57)

The cultural context of the changes that have happened in Russian prisons since the collapse of the USSR cannot be overlooked in the discussion of rehabilitation of women prisoners. As a number of women explained to us, good mental and emotional health is essential for surviving the prison experience. To this we would add that for personnel, women’s criminality is rooted in emotional deficits.

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Emotion therapy, for us, revealed how the demands of maintaining minimum standards and prisoner rights have overtaken a corrections agenda that has in place multi-disciplinary teams to support women and keep them safe and in contact with home.

Psychological needs and rehabilitative responses ‘It was not very sophisticated. It was simple. Just one person talking to us but she did help me.’ (Pr 44)

If emotion therapy is the guiding aim in rehabilitation, psychology testing is the tool used to implement a rehabilitation strategy. Psychological services vary in different penal contexts, with an almost total universal agreement, following Sykes, that imprisonment is psychologically burdensome, emotionally challenging, and socially isolating. Imprisonment is painful.23 Since 1991, psychologists in Russian prisons have either been civilian-trained, joining the prison service immediately on graduation or after a spell of civilian practice, or they have come through the Ministry of Justice institutes, receiving some psychology training as part of their overall prison officer apprenticeship. Like other penal personnel, they hold a military rank. Despite the problematic history of psychology in prisons, personnel were insistent that the continued separation of prison from civilian psychological services is justified on the grounds that it is only people who are in daily contact with prisoners who can fully assess their needs and coordinate them with other elements of their rehabilitation: I have rich experiences from working in here. Psychologists who work in civilian practice cannot boast the kind of rich and diverse experiences that we have here. It’s a very complex environment with complicated clients whose stories are complex. Sometimes it is hard to know where to start. If we think of a ball, when you pull the thread the ball unravels . . . but I am proud, especially when I see the results of my work. (Senior Psychologist in a women’s correctional colony, 2009) Everything [in rehabilitation] is developed alongside the psychological examinations, and we have developed notebooks and working diaries to accompany these examinations. For women, we focus on relaxation and communication. We discuss what ‘you’ and ‘I’ mean, and we also discuss what their perceptions of me as a person representing the administration are. An external professional coming in can only know so much about the tensions that exist between these women. (Head of Correction, IK14, Mordoviia, 2007)

Tests are used regularly and at almost all points of passage in the colony, from arrival in quarantine to the ‘critical’ six months before release when questionnaires are used to build up a profile of women prisoners. They are crucial evidence in parole hearings. We concluded from our conversations with personnel involved in psychological services that they were often burdened by the amount of testing and

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associated paperwork that had to be done. Scepticism about the amount of testing surfaces in these comments from the same senior psychologist we quote above: With each client, you are starting from scratch. You have to look at each client and diagnose them individually. But it can be like a conveyer belt in here; a lot of obligatory things have to be gone through. We do a lot of diagnostics in here. But I do like to talk to them too and sit them down and discuss issues. (Senior Psychologist in a women’s correctional colony, 2008)

This officer commented that she can often predict in advance what the answers to tests will be and how they will play out at parole hearings, so they are often a formality. She continued by admitting that prison psychologists are aware that they are behind the times in their reliance on psychometric testing: We gather a lot of opinions from staff on our methods. The quality of the tests has been debated as we have a lot of them. In another colony I worked in, we had about 5-6 methods – that was all – and all of them worked. A very well known psychologist who has researched aggression for over 25 years and whose work is found in centres all across Russia says that prisoners will always answer questionnaires quickly and say what is expected of them, and that this must change. We hear the same comments often – we will change, we will change. (Senior Psychologist in a women’s correctional colony, 2009)

There is patchiness in the introduction of innovations in rehabilitation and psychological interventions in the Russian penal service. In one of the colonies where interviews were carried out, much effort had been put into trying out different interventions, including those imported as a result of knowledge transfer from European partners. Other colonies use programmes developed within the penal service’s institutes, but since they are focused on men they have to be modified to meet ‘women’s special needs’. Colony psychological services can get help in adapting general programmes to the particular characteristics of their ‘contingent’, such as the twelve-steps programme on chemical dependency. One initiative that we were shown in IK14, Mordoviia is a rehabilitation detachment to which prisoners are transferred before release: the Centre for Psychological, Pedagogical and Social Work with Prisoners, opened in 2004. The purpose of the centre is to prepare women for release. It gives women a six-month course of lectures on how to find a job, helps them with securing the necessary documents they will need on the outside, teaches them how to cook and use a washing machine, and advises them on what to wear on the outside; but these are all side activities to the principal purpose which is to address the psychological problems associated with re-entry.24 This involves yet more testing and group therapy sessions, according to a programme developed by the Department of Psychological Services in FSIN, which aims at the development in women of ‘experience in self-analysis, prophylactic methods for dispelling negative psychological states engendered by criminal activities and the experience of imprisonment, and the correction of personal criminal characteristics’.25 This is achieved by way of a five-stage programme, each stage addressing a different aspect of the psychological deficit in women. The emphasis of the

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work with prisoners in the centre in IK14 not only demonstrates our argument about the dominance of emotion therapy in colonies, but also the impact of penal geography on rehabilitation. For six months women are prepared for life after prison inside the walls of a specially constructed detachment; true, they encounter there various officials from the local authority, invited in to give lectures, but these latter are from Zubovo-Polianskii municipal district, not the cities, towns, and rural districts to which the women will be returning. The women do not set foot outside the detachment, but then if they were to do this they would encounter the extended society of Ufsin-Mordoviia that we described in Chapter 4. Personnel admitted to us that such in-colony rehabilitation centres (there is also one at L’govo, although the detachment is located just outside the colony fences) are a poor substitute for halfway houses and probation services to ease the transition to freedom. Colonysettlements, which in the future are slated to replace standard regime colonies, are supposed to fill this gap, since they would allow prisoners to work in communitybased projects throughout their sentence, but their effectiveness will depend upon where they are located. The responses of the women prisoners to our invitation to talk about psychological services were mixed. We saw in Chapter 10 that one-quarter of the respondents to our questionnaire survey indicated that they would go to the psychologists if they needed help, but the number going to a fellow prisoner was greater. According to the 2009 census, 49.6 per cent of women prisoners in 2009 had used the psychological service in their colony (as against 31.0 per cent of men).26 Our questionnaire in Novyi Oskol showed the rate to be higher among juveniles, 60 per cent reporting that they used the colony’s psychological services. It was obvious from their comments that juvenile prisoners have a high degree of trust in psychologists. Adult women’s views were more differentiated. On the one hand, they recognized that nearly everyone needs help and that the psychological service should be there ‘for those who need it’; but they were also critical of various aspects of practice. For example, they commented on the youth and inexperience of psychologists and, consistent with their more general understanding of the desperate nature of women who choose to work in the penal service, they found it difficult to respect them: I can’t quite remember all the psychology stuff but I do remember the psychologist. Whoa, what a psychologist! She was a child! She would put all the boxes in front of you and it would be like: ‘tick this one, now that one’ [laughs]. It was funny. I sort of made fun of it and thought that it was she who still had a lot of learning to do. I thought to myself, ‘let me get you [emphasis on you] to tick the boxes’! It is really stupid and I do not know where they get these people. (Ex-Pr 15)

Women told us of their struggles to adapt and respond to psychological services. Some were convinced that the psychologists were simply using prisoners as ‘working material’ to try out new tests and analyses. Most scepticism among our interview partners was reserved for group-therapy sessions. Group work, understood by the colony staff as useful, nurturing, and supportive, can also be perceived as

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ineffective if it groups together women with different offending profiles and different needs. Bringing women together for analysis, as these excerpts show, provided little by way of a general or specific account of individual needs: The psychologist started a test with us. I am quite mature so I did wonder about what tests they would use. I wanted to know more about their validity . . . We had a kind of professional conversation and she said, ‘Oh, it’s just a questionnaire.’ I said, ‘I have experience. I was a consultant psychologist once, and here we have a grandmother who when she was drunk threw her grandchild off a balcony, and you are giving us all the same tests. Why aren’t you focusing on individual tests for us? You should work with us individually.’ I turned and left and did not participate . . . Why should I waste my time answering stupid questions? (Pr 45) I went to the group once, on a Saturday. I didn’t really get it. Of course, I understand that you sit in front of a bunch of people and they smile at you but I actually didn’t see the point of it in the colony . . . The people who are close to you are the ones who give you tight moral support. (Ex-Pr 2)

The self-organization of psychological help by prisoners was also the target of criticism: There are these ‘circles’ involved in support that offer psychological help. I really do think that it depends on the quality, as I am a perfectionist. The self-organization section for psychology is full of dilettantes . . . amateur counsellors. I once saw one of the books they were reading, ‘How to earn a million’, and I thought, ‘What’s that to do with it?’! How can you be a psychologist and read these sorts of books? (Pr 45)

Women were most positive about the psychological support services when they allowed one-to-one interaction with a professional. Not surprisingly, arrival in the colony and the period just before release were identified as periods when women welcomed the opportunity to talk through their problems and fears. Our same critic of the quality of help on offer acknowledged her own difficulty in adapting (she has an 11-year sentence): When I have nowhere to retreat to and nowhere to hide, when it gets too much, I write letters. When it gets bad, I can ask my boss in the detachment if it is OK to phone home, and thank God I can actually talk to her about stuff [gets upset and starts to cry]. I do go to a psychologist here. As soon as I arrived, I went to the psychologist. (Pr 45)

This is in contrast another prisoner, also with an 11-year sentence: I can’t explain it exactly but it is very isolated here, even though there are so many people. I have been to a psychologist and it was very heavy going. I did ask for help once and then I stopped. The psychologist was young and I am here for a long stretch . . . As far as I am concerned what’s happened has happened . . . I do feel I deserve what I got. I have reproached myself about this. What happened got me here . . . enough said. (Pr 52)

As these women’s words show, interpreting conversations with prisoners about psychological services is problematic because of individuals’ needs and experiences. This was especially the case with current prisoners who were all at different stages of adaptation. However, the personnel we quote above admit shortfalls.

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There is a strong sense of pride in the service, but there are constant complaints about under-staffing and the burden of paperwork. Most probably, there are also problems of low professional calibre; the history of the distorted psychiatry employed against offenders in the Soviet past must put off the best talent from applying to practise in the prison service. Whilst personnel recognize the shortfalls in psychological services in the colonies, we found less evidence of a willingness to incorporate the social context of offending into the analysis of women prisoners’ psychological states. Staff described the use of laboratories, tests, doctors, psychiatrists, and drug support as the standard treatment of women on a dayto-day level. Although medical back-up is often inadequate, when combined with psychological counselling a qualitatively different picture emerges of the approach to rehabilitation and treatment in women’s colonies compared to men’s, where there is significantly less emphasis on emotion work, mental health, and performativity of gender. This is not surprising given that many of the women prisoners interviewed in our study described themselves as having a range of emotional and mental health issues, while others were in a poor state of health. But the time and resources available for each prisoner are limited, and there are real difficulties that we have already described in bringing families to the colony from hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. In the context outlined above, gender differences are maximized to the full in the rehabilitation process. When we explored this further, we found that other rehabilitative interventions such as work, overcoming education deficit, and employment training were not perceived to be as relevant in addressing criminogenic needs as implementing programmes to target ‘volatile emotions’. The acute gender awareness that we came across runs counter to the situation in, for example, England and Wales where correctional services have been criticized heavily for gender-inappropriate practices.27 In Russian prisons the personality psychology tests aim to provide a ‘balanced summary of the prisoner profile’. However, as we were told by the head of the L’govo juvenile colony in 2007, the situational demands of the prison and communal dormitories make individual treatment and support an extremely difficult goal to achieve.

Conclusion To conclude this chapter, our research indicated that the overriding criteria for rehabilitation of women offenders in Russia are, indeed, isolating gender differences and delivering interventions to women based on them. This began with a penal approach that organized rehabilitation around emotion therapy followed by scientific testing—as it was often described to us. Unlike UK prisons where the debate on what works for women offenders continues to train attention on the need for inter-agency support for women, the Russian prison system establishes itself as different in its emphasis on gender-specific needs. However, reflecting the fact that up until now there has not been a policy response that enables women to

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serve their sentences in the community, prison is the penal space in which emotion therapy is conducted. A challenging issue for the prison service is how it will continue to address the needs of the vulnerable who do not pose a threat to communities, but for whom prison is the only sentencing option.28 The answer that FSIN has given in its new concept of reform is the ‘colonysettlement’, which first made its appearance in 1963–4 at about the same time as early release, or parole, was introduced, which required prisoners to stay on to work on national development projects.29 This, incidentally, is why many colonysettlements are situated in the old gulag complexes in the peripheries.30 In some respects the situation of the prisoner in the colony-settlement is like the non-convoy prisoner of the Soviet period; she resides in a compound which is subject to less security than the standard colony (that is, prisoners under supervision— nadzor—rather than under guard—okhrana), and is able to leave during the day to work outside.31 Currently, colony-settlements are used for offenders convicted of minor offences and for other offenders approaching the end of long sentences. Personnel we spoke to argue that these facilities serve the purpose of rehabilitation better than do centres such as the one we described above in IK14. We interviewed women in colony-settlement number 8 in Mordoviia. They were positive about the arrangements under which they lived and worked compared with the standard regime colonies, and they were convinced that the experience of leaving the colony to work was valuable in building up their confidence to resist the temptations of freedom that awaited them after release. However, as we have observed before, the challenges of the environment in which K-P8 is situated—the introverted penal zone in the Mordoviian forests—is a long way from what the prisoners will encounter when they return to their home place. Regardless of where they are incarcerated and, for all the cases we came across, regardless of their offence, the treatment and punishment of women sentenced to custody focus on their emotional state. In the absence of multi-agency implementation strategies around education, mental health, and family services, the authorities resort to basic, non-accredited psychological programmes that for us have important correlations to a heating up of the temperature on women and offending; in a sense, responses to women’s offending suggests lost trust in women’s ability to fulfil their role in contemporary culture. Scott describes prison officer work as having a distinctive ‘occupational morality’, whereby the cognitive responses of prison officers reflect personal but distinctive constructions of what prisons are for.32 For Scott, occupational morality involves developing norms, agendas, standards, and discipline in prison that are different from the outside world because the prison officer needs these demarcated constructions to separate out what he calls ‘the moral sphere’ of the prison from the everyday. Our research shows something quite different. We found that prison officers did not demarcate the outside world from the internal dynamic of the prison world, but were emotionally attached to incarceration in ways that were deeply cultural and historical. In Russia, the moral context of the prison is designed around a perceived moral context of the outside world. The role of the prison officer, we found, was to bring

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these two moral sites together to create not moral dualism or confusion but moral cohesion. We did not find disassociation or a form of immunity from prisoners’ lives. On the contrary, we learned that rehabilitation was an embodiment of specific understanding of Russian society, culture, and even penal history.

Notes 1. Liebling, A. and Maruna, S., ‘Introduction: the effects of imprisonment revisited’, in A. Liebling and S. Maruna (eds), The Effects of Imprisonment (Willan: Cullompton, 2005). 2. Codd, H., In the Shadow of the Prison: Families, Prison and Criminal Justice (Willan: Cullompton, 2008). 3. Feeley, M. and Simon, J., ‘The new penology: notes on the emerging strategy of corrections and its implications’, Criminology, 30/44 (1992), pp. 449–74. 4. Cohen, S. and Taylor, L., Psychological Survival (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972); King, R. and McDermott, K., The State of Our Prisons (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1995); Liebling and Maruna, op. cit.; Krutschnitt, C. and Vuolo, M., ‘The cultural context of women prisoners’ mental health: a comparison of two systems’, Punishment & Society, 9/2 (2007), pp. 115–50. 5. Kruttschnitt, C., ‘The politics of confinement: women’s imprisonment in California and the UK’, in A. Liebling and S. Maruna (eds), The Effects of Imprisonment (Willan: Cullompton, 2005), p. 158. 6. Maruna, S., Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild (American Psychological Association: Washington, DC, 2001). 7. Wacquant, L., ‘The great leap backward: incarceration in America from Nixon to Clinton’, in J. Pratt, D. Brown, S. Hallsworth, and W. Morrison (eds), The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, Perspectives (Willan: Cullompton, 2005), p. 15. See also Garland, D., ‘The limits of the sovereign state: strategies of crime control in contemporary society’, British Journal of Criminology, 36/4 (1996), p.p. 445–71; Feeley and Simon, op. cit. 8. Howard repeated his maxim in a spat with the new Conservative Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, in 2010; see Travis, A., ‘Howard is right: ‘prison works’—but this is no way to cut the crime rate’, Guardian, 7 December 2010. 9. Garland, D., The Culture of Control (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001), p. 27. 10. Moore, D. and Hannah-Moffat, K., ‘The liberal veil: revisiting Canadian penality’, in J. Pratt, D. Brown, S. Hallsworth, and W. Morrison (eds), The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, Perspectives (Willan: Cullompton, 2005). 11. Crawley, E. and Crawley. P., ‘Understanding prison officers: culture, cohesion and conflict’, in J. Bennet, B. Crewe, and A. Wahidin (eds), Understanding Prison Staff (Willan: Cullompton, 2008). 12. Gelsthorpe, L., ‘Sentencing and gender’, in R. Sheehan, G. McIvor, and C. Trotter (eds), What Works with Women Offenders (Willan: Cullompton, 2007). 13. Piacentini L., Surviving Russian Prisons. Punishment, Economy and Politics in Transition (Willan: Cullompton, 2004). 14. Ugolovno-ispolnitel’nyi kodeks Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Po sostoianiiu na 2009 (Eksmo: Moscow, 2009), p. 96. 15. Kazakova, V. A. Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody, Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), p. 13. 16. This is an ironic construction of a diminutive from the word psikh, ‘lunatic’. 17. Bloch, S. and Reddaway, P., Soviet Psychiatric Abuse: The Shadow over World Psychiatry (Westview Press: Boulder, 1985); Voren, R. van, On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union under Brezhnev to the ‘Soviet Union’ of Vladimir Putin (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2009). 18. On the current situation, see van Voren, ibid., and Global Initiative on Psychiatry, an NGO that is concerned with promoting reform, amongst others, in Russian psychiatry, including its use in prisons, and monitors current Russian practice. Its website is www.gip-global.org [accessed May 2012].

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19. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 55. 20. Piacentini, op. cit., pp. 56–8. 21. Pearce, S., ‘Offending behaviour programme for women offenders’, in R. Sheehan et al., What Works with Women Offenders (Willan: Cullompton, 2007). 22. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 12. 23. Sykes, G. M., The Society of Captives (Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J. 1958). 24. Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia: ‘Zhenshchiny v mestakh lisheniia svobody’, 11–13 oktobria 2007 (PRI: Moscow, 2008), p. 80. 25. ‘Opyt raboty s vich-infektirovanymi osuzhdennymi zhenshchinami po podgotovke k osvobozhdeniiu’, Dubrava, February 2007, pp. 4–5. 26. Kazakova, op. cit., p. 57. 27. Carlen, P., Women’s Imprisonment: A Study in Social Control (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1983); Sheehan, R. and Flynn, C., ‘Women prisoners and their children’, in R. Sheehan, G. McIvor, and C. Trotter (eds), What Works with Women Offenders (Willan: Cullompton, 2007). 28. On the problems associated with alternatives to custody for women, see Al’pern, L., Zhenshchiny i Deti v Rossiiskoi Tiur’me: Sbornik Materialov (TsSRUP: Moscow, 2001a), pp. 77–9. 29. Mikhlin, A. S., ‘Koloniia-Poseleniia i ogranichenie svobody’, Sotsialistichskoe Zakonodatel’stvo, 4 (1991b), pp. 51–2. 30. Because of the location of colony-settlements predominantly in the peripheries, women prisoners who have been given the option of being transferred to K-Ps have generally rejected it, as it would result in their going even further from home (pers. comm. T. Schmaeva). 31. The other privileges that prisoners in colony-settlements are allowed are wearing their own clothes, permission to live with their partners on the K-P territory if they are married, they can carry money, receive unlimited visitations and parcels. Under the new reform conception, two types of K-P are proposed: one would seem to resemble the current form, but the other is intended to have a stricter regime and it is not yet clear how it will be different from current standard regime colonies. 32. Scott, D., ‘Creating ghosts in the penal machine: prison officer occupational morality and the technique of denial’, in J. Bennett, B. Crewe, and A. Wahidin (eds), Understanding Prison Staff (Willan: Cullompton, 2008), p. 173.

12 Re-Socialization and the Construction of Gender Identities ‘The real problem for women, it seems, is not so much assumed weakness or lack of rational agency, but rather, the constraints and expectations associated with femininity, in general and with marriage and motherhood in particular.’ (Nicola Lacey, Women, Crime and Character: From Moll Flanders to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 2008, p. 142)

In this chapter we continue the discussion of the effect that prison authorities have in their efforts to re-socialize women prisoners during confinement and release. We detail women prisoners’ responses to a particular set of interventions or ‘actions’ (meropriiatiia) in the cultural sphere, in order to advance the debate beyond a criminological analysis of re-socialization towards a cultural critique of gender identity in women’s prisons. In Chapter 11 we outlined the penal code’s guidance on assisting women to desist from crime in what conventional criminology would describe as the rehabilitative penal process. Re-socialization across many prison jurisdictions, as outlined by Kruttschnitt and Vuolo, can be justified in a ‘rhetorical package’ one way, and then become a lived reality in an entirely different way.1 This is certainly the case in Russia, where for most of the twentieth century resocialization took the form of ‘political correction’. And today, beyond the architecture of penal governance and efforts to reform the penal system, there is a different penal reality where the prison authorities struggle to deliver a re-socialization that is useful and addresses the interpersonal and other hardships that women will experience in their daily lives after they are released. Yet, as we shall show in this chapter, there are inherent contradictions in the attitudes that penal agents bring to the task of re-socialization in women’s colonies, principal of which, following Anna Posadskaya, can be identified as the familiar ‘Madonna’ or ‘whore’ dilemma, symbolized in women’s colonies by the missionary efforts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the promotion by penal administrations of beauty contests and other celebrations of feminine beauty.2 Both draw upon stereotypical understandings of women’s role, but in the context of women’s correctional colonies they coexist within an overarching military and masculine atmosphere. As is the case in many Western prisons, the operational demands of, and penal control inside, women’s prisons correspond to a set of male paradigms.3 In Russia,

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military paradigms are additionally present, which is linked to two factors. The first is that security and control still rely on armed guards, dogs, and rifles, rather than electronic monitoring, such as CCTV. The second is that, despite the transfer of the prison service from the Ministry of Interior jurisdiction to a Justice model, traditional cultural and professional attitudes prevail: prison museums display with pride the historical Interior Ministry culture in prisons as one that instilled discipline, created dynastic legacies, promoted professional army ethics, and advocated productive Soviet work.4 The move towards a Justice framework, while in step with European norms, is perceived by many personnel as a step too far, taking the service away from a specifically ‘Russian’ penal management structure.5 Techniques used to neutralize European justice sensibilities take the form of re-animating army practices and protocols in managing prisoners and, as we learned in Mordoviia, the reproduction of a culture of militaristic, male attitudes towards work also.6 Hence, the inherent contradiction of military routines combined with the promotion of beauty contests. The head of correctional work at one of our research sites outlined in clear terms that the kinds of changes that are required from women who offend are ‘complex’ and ‘multiple’. This is not a new finding: the same comments are often uttered by prison personnel across the world, but when we looked closely at the lived reality of ‘re-socialization’ in women’s prisons in Russia, we discovered that there are unresolved and unsettling questions about how women’s gender identity is understood in the penal sphere, which reveal a story of how women ‘transgress’ from the conventional virtues bestowed upon them across a century of Russian culture. Linked into this is what we described in Chapter 1 as the ‘maternal metaphor’ of nationhood, which in the penal context involves the re-socialization of women prisoners using symbols, signs, and interventions that remind them of their gender role.7 These interventions include promotion of the Russian Orthodox Church and popular cultural events, such as annual beauty and talent contests organized around womanhood. We begin with a brief reminder of the issues raised in Chapter 1 around women, crime, and culture.

Re-socialization as re-imagining culture and gender The quotation from Nicola Lacey at the beginning of this chapter is a helpful reminder of how discourses on female criminality are drawn from traditional and patriarchal frameworks. Russians are remarkably loyal to traditions that maintain and re-affirm gender roles.8 In the matrioshka metaphor, women exist to uphold the continuity of generations and are figures who have an imposing strength and spirituality. The question we are interested in here is how we position understandings of women in Russia in the context of their offending behaviour. Echoing the early works of Lombrosso and Ferrero (1895), female criminality is viewed in Russia as something in ‘her nature’ and criminal women are described as biologically-defective and hormonally-driven. However, in

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recent times female criminality has become the subject of TV specials and reality shows with women offenders represented in contradictory terms: as a phenomenon created by unemployment, family breakdown, and the social problems inherent in present-day Russian society; or as ‘super-criminals’, more devious and dangerous than male criminals, full of envy, jealousy, and rage. Russian penological discourse takes Lombrosso one step further: the ‘family mandate’ demands that the health of the nation depends on women being normal and ‘not sick’. Female criminality, therefore, creates a cultural stigma, because it is an indication of the nation’s sickness. The normal woman, so the conventional wisdom goes, does not commit crime and, if she does, the moral cohesiveness and the collective conscience of Russian society are at risk. Russian criminologists view female crime as moral degradation and part of the public health time bomb of alcoholism or ‘psychopathology’.9 The state’s response to female crime has followed from these assumptions: women as victims of crime are often overlooked and women’s distinctive needs as offenders are not meaningfully recognized. Criminologists continue to describe female crime as a direct outcome of innate propensities, this despite the evidence to show that the effects of the acute social and economic breakdown in Russia since 1991 have led to increased levels of offending across all categories. Theoretical scholarship and critique are thin on the ground, so conceptions of crime, and hence punishment, remain stifled by intellectual inertia and reproduce, unchallenged, insights from the last 70 years. The result is the continuing dominance in Russia of a discourse that insists that women must understand their social role according to the stereotypes of motherhood and marriage, a tacit assumption about women’s ‘maternal instinct’ and desire for family, and a belief in the superior spiritual and emotional virtues of women compared to men. All these cultural ideas translate into a nostalgia for the past that has shaped the contours of criminal justice, popular culture, and mass media. Before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, women were subject to the same penal power as men, and the aim was to return them to society as better socialists, better workers, model proletarians, and politically corrected. Nowadays, it is the cultural image of ‘womanhood’ that drives penal power: penal correction starts from the perspective of women’s emotions and biology and aims to (re)turn women to being good mothers and daughters, gentler and kinder people. Consistent with this perspective, one of the distinctive features of Russian prisons compared with places of high punishment in the West is the central place given to cultural, gender, and spiritual enlightenment as essential for prisoner re-socialization. The women we interviewed engaged in a wide range of craft and cultural activities that fuse Russian history and artistic expression with ‘being a woman’. In the words of one prison officer we interviewed: We try to identify talent here . . . I know that some psychologists believe that competitions make the women feel very pretty and help them feel feminine. Not everyone has to jump up and down and sing and dance. You can do something else if you want to; something

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spiritual . . . in the Orthodox Church here, the women are singing constantly, and it is a moral exercise and uplifting. I think the regional penal authority should make this kind of singing compulsory.

This suggests to us that prison authorities are reacting to changes in Russian culture. Under Soviet conditions, everyone was expected to follow a concept of culture that was informed by a generalized belief in Marxism/Leninism. Nowadays, cultural references are to the pre-revolutionary past as represented by the Russian Orthodox Church; and to a modern age that is internet-saturated, media-infused, and non-political. In the penal realm in the West, generally speaking, styles of re-socialization are loose and fluid. In Russia, by contrast, non-engagement with cultural activities is perceived by prison authorities as corrosive to the reform of the prisoner. The message is consistent and clear: the re-socialization of prisoners is only valid if a prisoner participates in social and cultural events, and that these bear on both adaptation, release, and re-entry. Passivity is not an option. Indeed, passivity is viewed as a challenge to the perceived view of what a woman offender needs: rather, she must be both strong and feminine, a citizen and a nurturer, and, above all, a participator.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s missionary project in penal colonies During the Soviet period, the main business that prisons had with religious believers was to imprison them. ‘Believers’ were among the intellectual dissidents who were incarcerated throughout the Soviet period for profession of their faith. Since 1991, religion’s relationship with the penal service has undergone an about-turn: it is not just that the constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience and religious association means that religion is no longer a reason for being imprisoned, but that the prison service positively encourages religious belief among prisoners and has invited organized religion, and in particular the Russian Orthodox Church, into prisons to assist it in its rehabilitative efforts with prisoners. In fact, FSIN has been increasingly prepared to cede that role to organized religion. At the signing of a new cooperation agreement with the Russian Orthodox Church in February 2011, Alexander Reimer, the head of FSIN, declared that, while colonies already do work on re-socialization, ‘the work of priests, we consider, is even more important than that of our correction officers’.10 Following an experiment in four penal authorities, including Ufsin-Mordoviia, it was decided in 2011 to bring priests onto the permanent staff of penal colonies. Initially, and presumably because of financial restrictions, space has been made for priests by replacing social workers. Religion, in fact, is one of the growth areas in Russian correctional colonies, both in terms of the number of prisoners who profess a faith and in terms of its visibility. The presence of religion is obvious in the churches and ‘prayer rooms’ that have sprung up on the territory of colonies, the place reserved for priests at

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any significant anniversary or other official gatherings involving the penal service, and in the mass celebration of church holidays which apparently attract large numbers. According to the Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘social concept’ that defines its relationship with society, the practical role of the Church in penal institutions is to arrange places of prayer, hold pastoral talks, distribute religious literature, and collect and distribute clothes, medicines, and other necessities among prisoners. These activities are secondary to its task of relieving ‘the heavy lot of prisoners’ and helping ‘the moral healing of their crippled souls’.11 The Russian Orthodox Church sees prisons as particularly fertile ground for its missionary work. Since 1991 approximately 1,000 devotional spaces, including nearly 500 churches, have been built in correctional colonies; and the aim of most regional authorities is to have a church in every colony.12 In Mordoviia seven colonies, including IK14 for women, already have churches—and there is also a mosque under construction. These are no modest constructions. They are stand-alone, ornamented buildings which ‘cede nothing to churches on the outside’ and whose painted onion domes can often be seen above colony fences, announcing to the world beyond the Church’s presence and authority. The Russian Orthodox Church’s understanding of the causes of criminal behaviours is fundamentally the same as the penal authorities’, in that whilst it acknowledges that social and economic conditions (to which it adds, also, weak government) can provoke criminal behaviours, the main source of offending behaviours lies in the nature of the individual, in ‘human sinfulness’. Crime is the consequence of the ‘darkened state of the human heart’ to which imprisonment is a justified response, since it gives offenders time to reflect upon their sinful behaviour and return to liberty ‘internally purified’. Where women are concerned, this purification is associated with a return to their preordained gender role as mothers and homemakers. The prisoner faces a, binary, choice of ‘doing evil’ or ‘turning to God’, and it is the Church’s mission in correctional colonies to help the prisoner make the right choice. Among the penal personnel we interviewed, there was an acceptance and recognition of the Church’s leading role in delivering redemption which at times verged on the mystical. Thus the boss of IK14 in Mordoviia told us how the tuberculosis sufferers among the brigade of women who built the church in his colony were miraculously cured of their illness; the same story was written up in Dubrava, the institutional newspaper. There was a general view that the building of a church in a colony improves the ‘psychological climate’ and that believers are better adapted than non-believers. In response to the question about what is the hardest thing in the colony for women, one senior corrections officer replied as follows: It is really difficult to say what the hardest thing is for them . . . but I believe one of the most important things is prayer, more important than bread and food. If a prisoner believes, everything falls into place and they are easier to manage. Of course if a prisoner does not believe then problems start – they are isolated, lonely, and have problems with relatives. Relationships are better with relatives when you believe. In my view, if a woman has faith

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there is something different about her. Her aura is different, her soul surfaces. When you talk to her you sense this.

For personnel the returns in the 2009 FSIN census, reproduced in Table 12.1, would seem to confirm such a conviction. The importance of faith surfaced in various ways in the talk of the women we interviewed. For many, the attraction of the Church appeared to be less about doctrine or liturgy than the fact that the church building was one of the places where they could get away from the crowd: ‘I love the church. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I like it. I like to just sit and feel calm’ (Pr 60); ‘I came for the silence, not the talk’ (Pr 3); and ‘I would go in and reflect and come out feeling normal’ (Ex-Pr 18). The last respondent was not alone when she added that she was not sure whether she actually believed. Others said the priests helped with their psychological problems, offering an alternative to colony psychologists, and one told us that the priest saved her from suicide. There were converts who found faith in prison or had their pre-existing faith confirmed and strengthened: ‘As soon as I got here I was introduced to a woman who took me to the church, and it was as if everything got better straight away. I could understand more and I was able to see God. So everything became OK’ (Ex-Pr 6). We heard stories of women who saw angels in prison, whose faith gave them the confidence to quit drugs, and one who was intending to join a nunnery after release. In IK14 in Mordoviia the authorities reported mass attendance at Easter and other main Orthodox holidays, when people of other faiths, including Muslims, we were told, would join in. But the congregation of active church-goers was a smaller group. They constituted a clear community within the colony. Such groups help to build or maintain church buildings, drink tea together, and work in the church. There were some signs of subversion also, which took the form of resistance against the Russian Orthodox Church in Table 12.1. Religion and adaptation in women’s correctional colonies Religious faith

Attitude among women prisoners towards the penal authorities Positive

Neutral

Negative

Perpetual offenders against internal rules

Total

% of total

Women

Men

Atheism 38.3 44.5 15.2 1.5 100.0 15.8 30.0 Russian 44.3 43.1 11.8 0.8 100.0 77.0 61.1 Orthodox Judaism 40.5 47.6 11.9 0.0 100.0 0.1 0.2 Buddhism 62.2 28.9 5.6 3.3 100.0 0.3 0.6 Non-Orthodox 48.9 37.6 12.8 0.7 100.0 2.5 1.5 Christianity Islam 46.0 41.7 10.9 1.4 100.0 4.1 6.1 Other 37.1 43.6 17.7 1.6 100.0 0.2 0.5 Total 43.7 43.1 12.3 0.9 100.0 100.0 100.0 Source: Kazakova, V. A., Zhenshchiny otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody (obshchaia kharakteristika) (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), pp. 73–5. The figures relate to 1 in 2 of the women and 1 in 10 of the men serving prison sentences on 12–18 November 2009, pp. 16 and 79.

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favour of an alternative religion or a rejection of religious belief. One former prisoner told us that the church lavatory was one place ‘where women gathered to plan escapes’ (Ex-Pr 4). The interviews told us that women see the church as a place of physical safety and solitude, away from the compression of the detachment. For a smaller group, it also helped loosen the connections with their previous criminal self and strengthened the connections to an, as yet unknown, release and the construction of a new self. But it is important to note that, from its first entry into prisons, the Russian Orthodox Church has aligned itself with penal power in terms of how it conceives of women’s criminality and the paths out of it. Furthermore, the Russian Orthodox Church is an exclusively male hierarchy, headed by the Patriarch. Essentially, in ceding some of their re-socialization role to the Russian Orthodox Church, the penal authorities are reaffirming an ultra-traditional image of the woman that reestablishes her centre stage as the life-affirming mother figure of the matrioshka ethos. The Orthodox Church does not permit women to wear trousers or make-up and it requires a woman’s head to be covered with a headscarf, the latter the very same requirement laid on them by the penal authorities. Russian feminists accuse the Church of putting women back into their ‘golden cage’.13 A woman’s double isolation in penal colonies, it transpires, confines her in a double cage of Russian Orthodoxy and the prison. Just occasionally, she is allowed to escape to reveal the other side of her ‘essential nature’ in authoritysanctioned cultural interventions.

Pageantry, jokes and gendered re-socialization Activities, or meropriiatiia, organized around culture and creativity, figured in many of the interviews with both personnel and prisoners. Officially, they are represented as a means of entertainment for the prisoners, but it became apparent that they are considered to do far more than this. ‘Activities’ can be modest: for example small ‘circles’ for reading or knitting that arise semi-spontaneously; or they can be organized by the ‘culture and sport self-organization section’ in a detachment and involve ‘public’ performance; or they can be colony-wide and draw in women from all detachments. There is often a competitive component to cultural activities: circle pitched against circle, detachment against detachment, and colony against colony. The main activities at this highest level, in which women’s colonies become involved, are annual beauty pageants and KVN (klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh) competitions—the so-called ‘club of fun-loving and resourceful people’. There are also sports competitions, but we noted that opportunities for more physically-based activities were limited in women’s colonies compared with men’s. We found that sports halls were either closed or were doubling up for other functions, and there were no games pitches for women. Some of the women interviewed drew our attention to this deficit: ‘There is no sports hall. If there was one, it would be easier here. It’s very tense and if they put something

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into sports, then it would be OK . . . normal’ (Pr 41). We did not come across a programme for taking the women out of the colony to exercise sites in the community or other prisons. For the most part women had to be content with aerobics classes and running (although space could be a problem) to keep themselves fit. Annual beauty pageants were introduced into women’s colonies in the early 1990s following the enthusiastic importation of beauty contests to Russia from the West under Gorbachev’s perestroika. Although they were essentially modelled on ‘Miss World’ competitions, they were customized to more conservative Russian culture (the ball gown rather than bathing suit emphasized). Their aim was elevated to ‘instilling hope and virtue’, rather than danger, through a parade of womanly beauty.14 In the prison context, the purpose was redemptive. The 1990 winner of the ‘Miss Colony’ competition in L’govo educational colony was reported as having undergone a miraculous transformation as a result of participating in the competition, her former truculence melting away.15 Today the title ‘Miss Colony’ has been dropped from most pageants in favour of an alternative name such as ‘Miss Charm’ or ‘Miss Spring’ that has less obvious penal connotations. Fundamentally, the format has remained unchanged from the prototype contests: participants compete in front of an audience of their peers within each prison and a panel judges their appearance and costumes, their responses in an interview, and their singing and dancing. The competions are normally held to coincide with International Women’s Day, 8 March. Each detachment chooses its own competitor and makes costumes, creates hairstyles and make-up, composes lyrics and choreography for the performances. Where women’s prisons are clustered together, the winners from different colonies compete against one another in an inter-colony competition. The KVN, like beauty pageants, is a competition based on ‘performance’. The ‘club of fun-loving and resourceful people’ originated on Soviet television in the late 1950s and today there is a national league, although teams from penal colonies do not, to our knowledge, compete in this. In colonies, teams are put together in each detachment. The competition is a sort of variety show involving each team having to give humorous answers to questions put to it by the audience, improvise performances around unexpected themes and perform pre-prepared sketches to entertain. The winner is the team that generates the greatest laughter. As with beauty pageants, the victorious team goes on to compete in inter-colony competitions. It hardly needs stating that beauty pageants ‘perform gender’ in a way that is consistent with stereotypical constructions of Russian womanhood, but the same can also be said for other cultural activities such as KVN, plays, light entertainment shows, talent contests, and competitions to demonstrate various domestic skills such as cake-baking, needlepoint, and, as we noted in Chapter 9, mothering skills.16 Most women prisoners appear to internalize the penal service’s intentions of gendered re-socialization and willingly practise and perform selfpresentation and femininity—even, in the case of the ‘Miss Spring’ competition in one colony, rehearsing their role as future brides.17 The material rewards for

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victory in these contests encourage feminine virtues. Prizes are awarded to winners. These can be flowers, DVD players, CDs of romantic songs, cakes, samovars and tea-sets, cosmetics, books and women’s magazines, irons and ironing boards, and, occasionally, money. Below are some extracts from women’s talk about their participation in cultural measures: I like the distraction of participating . . . the rehearsals for concerts and the different atmosphere. You can even sometimes forget where you are. I have got involved more in the last couple of years at the detachment level and also at the colony level, but I have to go to work every day, my involvement is limited. If I had time, I would do more. I just don’t want to sit on my bed and do nothing… You still need to keep busy and do things here. (Pr 52) I was in charge of leisure in my detachment. When you are doing these kinds of things, well, time just flies by. We make costumes and we prepare the stage, the scenery . . . everything. It is so important to have these things – not just so that a woman can earn parole – but for our leisure as prisoners. It helps distract us . . . I consider these things to be absolutely essential. Aside from organizing, I also dance, as I have a talent for that I discovered here. (Pr 43) I haven’t participated in Miss Colony but some girls in the detachment have. I am really interested in it and I think we really need these competitions because they make a woman feel like a woman. (Pr 26) I pray to the Holy Trinity when I need to be distracted and I watch TV too. I participate in pretty much everything here to overcome any feelings of melancholy, but I would like to see more going on because all the activity helps you to feel encouraged and move forward. Any encouragement is one step towards freedom. If you do not get that encouragement, then you step back. (Pr 41)

Prisoners’ enthusiasm for performance is not surprising given the context: prison life revolves around flow control, a daily routine and repetitive work; the physical environment of colonies is unremittingly ‘grey’. It is also obvious that some women did discover a previously undeveloped talent. Dance, song, acting, and other creative activities all can play a therapeutic role in helping damaged people, although much depends upon how these therapies are delivered. As King and McDermott note, prison conditions can be extreme and there is a great deal of research evidence that, for prisoners, just getting through their time is of primary importance.18 The extracts above show that cultural activities not only pass the time for women, but help them build relationships. Women in prison tend to collaborate more than compete.19 Yet in Russian colonies this takes place within a pervasive competitive culture, raising questions about the extent to which imprisonment enhances competitiveness and authoritarianism within an already punitive culture.20 If cultural activities provide women with diversion and help time pass, these extracts also refer to another motivation for participation: that it helps with applications for early release, thus adding an instrumental dimension to participation. We examine the role of ‘participation’ as incentive towards ‘good behaviour’ in the next section. There were aspects of the cultural activities that we found surprising. For example, we learned that the inter-colony beauty pageant finals in Mordoviia take place

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in a men’s colony before a team of judges consisting of the bosses of the zone’s 17 facilities—all men. We believe this raises troubling questions about the use of the male gaze to validate women’s femininity. The presence of men was welcomed by the women who said they liked looking nice for men: ‘Men come here for the entertainments from other colonies and they enjoy them a lot . . . the performances go down very well’ (Pr 28); and ‘Men come to the colony for KVN. For example, this year there were two male teams from colonies, plus our girls. Our girls won second place’ (Pr 26). These competitions, therefore, blur the distinction between the hierarchy of men who exercise direct power over women’s bodies and those who, although kept at a distance by the guards patrolling the aisles during the performances, are a reminder of the gendered structures of power which await women at the end of their sentences. And there is the other complicating dimension of the ‘male gaze’ of the ‘real guys’—the women prisoners who adopt male identities—as discussed in Chapter 10. The performances of gender roles also blur the boundaries between ‘captor’ and ‘prisoner’. FSIN has its own annual competition to find the best male and female officers in national contests. Each penal region chooses its ‘champions’. UfsinMordoviia chooses its male representative in a competition called ‘Long Live Officers’, in which male officers compete to demonstrate their command of penal codes and human rights legislation, combat readiness, and physical prowess, including running and unarmed combat. In the parallel competition for women officers for the title of ‘Miss Ufsin-Mordoviia’, the winner must show not only knowledge of the penal codes, but also ‘elegance and beauty’. Similarly, in Tver oblast, women officers competing for ‘Miss Five Stars’ are judged not just on their knowledge of correction protocols, physical fitness and pistol shooting, but also on their ‘beauty, acting, choreography, and command of etiquette’.21 The majority of our interview partners, prisoners and personnel, described the set-piece cultural activities in positive terms, insisting that they bring colour and laughter into an otherwise grim space; they make the prisoners ‘feel good’, raise spirits, and help re-socialization by boosting self-esteem. But we did hear dissenting voices and found evidence of resistance: When I have free time, I will read or I will participate in sport. I do not participate in cultural events. (Pr 2) So, a man comes and sits and watches; will that be the end of it? It’s just stereotypes we’re showing. (Ex-Pr 6) The young girls go to other colonies for further competitions—I haven’t taken part yet [laughs ironically]. Miss Colony is very good, though. It’s been going on for several years. We carry the uniforms, we make the evening dresses that the women designed for themselves . . . it’s great. (Pr 13)

This last prisoner, who was 48 and serving an 18-year sentence, took the opportunity, when the Russian minder attending the interview left briefly, to lean over and say quietly that, actually, she did not like the contests at all. Her comments drew our attention to the fact that, almost without exception, pageants are focused on

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youth; the feminine image being promoted is of young, fertile beauty. Another potentially dissenting voice is Elena’s, winner of the 2008 pageant in Cheliabinsk colony number 5, who in the final evening-gown round of the colony beauty contest appeared on stage in her prison uniform and headscarf. Her explanation was that she thought it important that ‘we shouldn’t ever forget where we are’.22 It is unlikely that this statement was made without the authority of the colony boss, but there might have been an element of subversion in the action. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing how it was received by the audience. Scepticism about the usefulness of cultural performances as a preparation for release surfaced in the talk of interviewees, even while their popularity was acknowledged: It’s not that big a preparation for release, is it? But the women like it. That’s why it’s good. Every detachment does its own thing and it allows the women to be themselves. (Pr 13) I got some qualifications in prison: fire-safety, physical education, industrial work . . . I worked morning ’til night to get the qualifications and experience that I needed. I did well, but I thought . . . the entertainments were just foolish, and I did not want to participate in them. Sometimes they’d pressure me, saying, ‘you are not living if you don’t take part!’ I simply did not want to be in shows and that sort of thing and it was really heavy going [to resist]. (Pr 16)

Prison personnel mostly endorsed the cultural activities, stressing their useful rehabilitative effect. But their endorsements have to be understood in the context of a prison system where investment in meaningful, individually-focused interventions are extremely scarce and the priority is to control the crowd. As we observed in Chapter 5, discipline and order is maintained in correctional colonies by subjecting women to a spatio-temporal choreography that leaves them little spare time for the sort of reflection that might manifest itself in non-compliance and protest. So keeping women busy is functional to order in a colony. Cultural events give women the opportunity to take responsibility, become involved and express themselves artistically; in short, to exercise agency, but it is a highly controlled and directed agency. The officer below, one of the few who were prepared to question the efficacy of mass cultural events, voices some of the concerns that we had: I think it is one-sided to justify these contests as good for the soul – creating beauty and dreams of a life away from rags. They help distract the women and fill their time and that is not a bad thing, but for the soul and its development, they are of little use, I think. What’s the point of walking about half-naked in a parade and what are the benefits? It is a fantasy about a beautiful remote life. When the young girls are released, where do they go? Is the idea for them to become prostitutes? Or to go and work in a strip bar? It seems to me we need to be more serious about our approach…

This officer contrasted the ‘entertainment’ of the pageants and competitions with a theatre-therapy project that had been introduced into her colony by the NGO Penal Reform International. She said she had been shocked to have it brought

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home to her how little in the way of rehabilitation the colony’s current cultural activities achieve. When the on-the-ground reality of minimum standards and poor resources is taken into account, Russian prison personnel have to rely on what is immediately available to them to demonstrate their commitment to resocialization and to the humanization of their approach. The hole has been plugged with nostalgia and a gendered discourse that finds its most outward expression in mass cultural activities. To sum up this section, participation in cultural activity creates routes towards re-socialization for some women, but it is also associated with a ‘culture of punishment’ because of the censure that non-participation attracts. In a classic Foucauldian sense, penal power is inextricably linked to modes of discipline and reform that create a style of punishment that is co-terminous with anxieties about gender. Resistance to the styles and cultural texts underpinning re-socialization is discussed below, but it is worth pointing out here that the penal regime affords maximum opportunities to engage women in emotion therapy and spiritual and personal reform that is modelled on excelling in performance-related activities. A form of gendered penal theatre is the backdrop to what we describe below as a cultural approach to discipline and punishment.

Culture as punishment and the celebration of penality At various points in this book we have referenced women prisoners’ explanations for particular behaviours as helping or undermining their prospects for achieving early release. The subject surfaced in women’s talk about activists and informers, about participating in cultural events, and about resistance and compliance in relation to the regime. UDO (Uslovno-dosrochnoe osvobozhdenie) is a form of parole, but without much post-release management. It is one of a number of measures that are supposed to incentivize prisoners toward good behaviours, which, in addition, include being put onto a lighter regime (oblegchennie usloviia) in the existing colony, transferral to a colony-settlement, a reduction in the length or sentence, and ‘break’ in sentence (for pregnant women and women with young children). The 2009 census showed that just under one-quarter of prisoners in 2009 were on a lighter regime and 3.1 per cent had been transferred to a colony-settlement.23 The conditions for the application of these various measures are laid down in the codes governing the punishment of offenders. Applications involving release or transfer to colony settlements depend upon the article under which the prisoner is convicted and can only be made when a certain proportion of the sentence has been completed. UDO is, understandably, the goal of many prisoners. Decisions about early release are taken by the court in whose jurisdiction the applicant’s colony is situated, and the process is often ‘complex’ and ‘controversial’.24 A prisoner applying for early release has to demonstrate that she has ‘achieved the goals of correction’ and ‘will not offend again’ as outlined in article 11 of the criminal correction

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code; that is, she has to prove that she accepts societal behavioural norms, including its sanitary and hygienic norms; that she has behaved according to the rules of the penal facility during her period of incarceration; that she has obeyed (legal) demands made of her by the colony administration; and that she behaves respectfully towards personnel and other prisoners.25 There are some objective measures that help the court reach its decision: the prisoner’s work record, classroom attendance, record of rule violations, record of rewards for good behaviour; and it can also take into account the prisoner’s family situation—her likelihood of getting a job and somewhere to live. It is the more subjective aspect of the process in which we are interested: that is, the recommendation (kharakteristika) from the head of the prisoner’s colony, put together on the basis of reports from the detachment leader, psychologist, and relevant security personnel. Notwithstanding the fact that the court is not required to reach a judgement that reflects the colony’s recommendation, the women we interviewed were convinced that its role was decisive: I can only talk about my own impressions [referring to the pageants and competitions] but there is a lot of garbage in it. People do it just for UDO. If a woman just sits out her sentence and does nothing else then she might not get UDO . . . Earlier, there was work and there was a sense of the collective, of the team, but now instead we have this competition between the detachments . . . it’s just a frivolous thing. (Ex-Pr 6) Everyone is expected to participate, whether you want to or not. My UDO was refused but I am not sure whether it was because I did not participate. In general, I don’t like to participate. I did in one festival and that was it. I was asked once why I do not participate. I said that it was enough that I work here and that I am not a clown. I have twenty years to sing songs and read poems but I am not here to entertain people. So I do not do it willingly. Next time for UDO, I will just say what is expected: ‘you are right and I need to build rapport’. (Ex-Pr 11)

An NGO worker confirmed to us that simply ‘keeping your head down’ was not an option for a prisoner who wanted to be certain of a successful application for early release. If not leading directly to UDO, participation can be instrumental in a prisoner gaining ‘improved conditions’, the first step on the ladder towards a successful application for early release. In a document outlining a proposed new approach to re-socialization circulated for discussion to regional penal authorities in 2011, the importance of participation is formalized as an indicator of the ‘psycho-physical correction’ of a prisoner’s personality. Henceforth, it is proposed, prisoners’ applications for upward mobility through six stages of ‘social lift’, culminating in release, will depend among other things on a prisoner’s ‘active participation in cultural and sports activities’ and ‘membership of religious organizations operating on the territory of the colony’.26 The result is that participation is, in effect, compulsory for any prisoner wanting a positive recommendation; this is the use of ‘culture’ and religion as forms of corporeal discipline, or even as punishment. ‘Enforced’ participation can also be experienced as humiliation: The administration decided on a show like the ones we used to have in the kids’ pioneer camps when we were small. We sang ‘Marusia’. The Head of Colony decided to give these

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songs a go. I felt awful about this because we did not want to do it. We cursed the administration for making us sing songs standing on one leg. The only ‘plus’ was we got to sing. We practised all weekend and it caused problems and everyone ended up cursing. (Ex-Pr 4)

That the official view brings together ‘participation’ as ‘useful and rehabilitative’ with a possible early parole hearing is not unusual in prisons in many societies. In Russia, however, it is a question of degree. As we explained in Chapter 11, Russia does not operate the kinds of prisoner accreditation programmes found in the UK that mark out funding resources and various other forms of interventions according to, among other things, risk and need. Prisons in the UK have long been criticized by criminologists for being topdown, tiered, and managerialist. In the Russian case, whilst many of the re-socialization programmes were arranged around emotional therapeutic approaches, the cultural activities outlined here are currently indicative of more localized and devolved approaches aimed at motivation. The recourse of the Russian penal service to the help of the Orthodox Church and beauty pageants in re-socialization is revealing both of its limitations in looking at the social context of crime and the degree to which it is out of synchronicity with many Western penal systems. Research by Haney has shown that in penal systems where the emphasis is on making changes to behaviour, re-socialization ‘is likely to be less effective’ than when it is community-focused.27 Yet in Russia, while the importance of the social context is acknowledged as problematic, it is not integrated into meaningful resocialization approaches that provide coping strategies for women. The result is that the authorities resort to a familiar locus of activities that emphasize the collective and programmes intended to re-imagine the gender anxieties of the political/penal state. The position in favour of a re-socialization that focuses on enhancing the image both of beauty and feminine behaviour and of ‘Mother Russia embodied’ provides a basis for us to predict that for many women prisoners there is anxiety about their ability to fulfil the roles expected of them. The scale and organization of gendered practices overwhelmed us. But we did find evidence of more positive engagements with culture away from the official centre. The prisoner we quote below provides an insight into the institutional and structural reality facing administrators in providing a different range of approaches that can assist with re-entry. At the same time it shows the capacity for women to develop ‘bottom-up approaches’ that positively reinforce their interests: We have a reading group here that came about spontaneously . . . the number changes. There are four of us permanently and there are occasionally people who get into the subject and who join in. I feel emotional about this group because there is nothing else to do here . . . it’s just NTV and cheap TV shows. (Pr 52)

One of the questions that preoccupied us is whether current styles and practices of cultural enrichment discussed here and emotion therapy discussed in Chapter 11 can ‘prepare’ women for re-entry and the multifaceted challenges that lie ahead

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after release. Indeed, a key question for us is what impacts these styles and cultural texts that shape re-socialization inside are likely to have on the social experience of freedom. When previous ‘selves’ are held in suspension as a result of fragmented or completely severed contact with the outside world, re-socialization occupies a liminal space. In that space a woman’s identity is (re)constructed in the context of a new order and institutional demands. She leaves prison on the threshold of ‘becoming a better woman’, with a new sense of self and well-being.28 Yet reintegration is shaped by the formative experience of incarceration and, in this sense, the prospects for successful re-entry are contingent on conceptions of how women should settle on the outside. We discuss women’s preparation for re-entry in the final section of this chapter.

Preparation for release and geographical concerns In Western prison establishments, geographical distance is viewed as having a directly negative impact on prisoners when they are released, because of obstacles it presents to maintaining contacts. The Corston Report (2007) found that the average distance for families to travel to see loved ones in prison is 50–60 miles. In Russia, our research has shown that that average distances vastly exceed this and that in extreme cases women can be sent to colonies over 1,500 miles from home. It is difficult not to conclude that Russia’s penal geography is an acutely more painful experience for women than in many other jurisdictions. The rationalization on the part of authorities to work on time-passing contests, competitions, and pageants becomes more problematic as a discourse when geography is taken into account: deprived of meaningful interaction with society outside, women’s correctional colonies become a space for enacting static, in-prison practices that bring to the fore complex idealizations of gender and womanhood. The reality that women prisoners face in Russia is an arduous route into and out of incarceration, layered with pain and difficulty because geography shrinks and is ultimately destructive of an engagement with a recognizable ‘real world’. Yet this does not mean that women prisoners are not prepared for release. In a variety of ways, although women are denied—through geography—regular contact with relatives and friends on the outside, they are provided with a window to the outside world which has significant effects on their attachment, or non-attachment, to place and on their mobility towards home. As these officers from colonies in different parts of European Russia indicate, colonies have programmes in place specially designed for women due to be released: We also do motivational interviews. We have to prepare them for release because they will enter a completely new environment and everything will be new to them when they are out of here. (Prison Officer: K-P8, Mordoviia) We have a ‘School for Freedom’ here, where women work on psychological and social issues. We provide them with training to help them understand that they are integral to their

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world. They write CVs for work and we use role-play to re-enact employment scenes for them. We do everything to make sure that the women are not disconnected from the outside world. (Prison Officer: IK2, Mordoviia)

With few exceptions, we found that personnel involved in preparing women for release were serious about their work, within the constraints they operate under: I have worked here for 18 months. I came here with my husband because I wanted to take my career forward and help people. That is the main thing I do: help women. We do lots of new stuff and things like training and motivational work. For me, what is essential is that women can adapt to life outside . . . so that they feel whole again. Everything will be new to them when they are released. (Correctional Officer: IK2, Mordoviia)

In some colonies women are moved to a separate detachment at some time in the six months before release. This was the case in the women’s colonies in Mordoviia where these detachments are a smaller-scale version of the rehabilitation centre we described in Chapter 11. The dormitories for women due for release are decorated to be ‘more domestic’ than the normal detachment dormitory: with hotellike multiple-occupancy rooms, kitchens, and classrooms for the delivery of a variety of themed discussions and practical classes. In Mordoviia these classes go under titles such as ‘housewife’, ‘hairstyles’, ‘school for young mothers’, ‘needlework and sewing’.29 Women have sessions to help them with the practicalities of re-entry; it is here that the colony social worker comes into her own. It is her job to help women solve problems with their documentation: a perennial problem is acquisition of an internal passport and renewal of the living permit. Six months before a woman is released, the social worker writes to the local authority where the prisoner was previously domiciled to inform the employment and housing agencies of her needs. The response rate to these letters is extremely low. Women, therefore, often need to be given advice on how to negotiate freedom in the absence precisely of somewhere to live, a job, and necessary documentation. In common with women prisoners in other jurisdictions, anxieties about employment and money are uppermost among the concerns of prisoners on the eve of release and are reflected in immediate post-release plans, as Tables 12.2 and 12.3 show. Inevitably, there are differences in the anxieties and immediate plans of adults and juveniles. Juveniles are worried about the effect of having a criminal record on being accepted in educational institutions or securing a job. They also have more anxieties about relationships; and, specifically, whether their parents will have forgiven them (an anxiety that may be exacerbated by the seeking-ofparental-redemption discourse in juvenile colonies); and fears of falling back into bad company. In many respects, preparation for release is similar in Russian colonies to what happens in most jurisdictions where a balance is sought between creating employment opportunities and personal development. However, in Russia, prison colonies seem to have embraced the notion that women are more anxious, more isolated, acutely vulnerable, and less physically and mentally well compared to

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Table 12.2. The principal anxieties about release among women and juveniles in IK2 and IK14, Mordoviia, and in Novyi Oskol educational colony Principal sources of anxieties associated with release named by survey respondents:

Adult women (% of population sample)

Juvenile women (% of population sample)

20.3 16.8 8.9 10.1 4.6 39.3 100.0 89

33.3 16.6 20.8 8.3 8.3 12.5 100.0 24

Securing work or place to study Money problems Relationships Unfamiliarity with modern life Lack of documents None Total N=

Sources: own surveys, 2007 (Mordoviia) and 2010 (Novyi Oskol)

Table 12.3. Adult and juvenile women prisoners’ immediate plans after release Immediate post-release plans named by survey respondents: Find work Home, family, children Live a normal life Study Pension Others Don’t know Total N = 25

Adult women (% of population sample)

Juvenile women (% of population sample)

46.5 30.3 8.7 7.5 1.2 2.9 2.9 100.0 172

20.0 13.3 15.5 52.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 100.0 25

Sources: own surveys, 2007 (Mordoviia) and 2010 (Novyi Oskol)

men. Criminal justice social work in Russia is in a poor condition and has yet to embed itself in the penal system fully and cohesively. Thus, while social workers can help women gather and prepare the necessary documentation they will need once they are released, they are hampered by their lack of connection with outside agencies, especially in the women’s home towns: If a prisoner has been serving a sentence for ten years, then that is a very long time and they need to learn the basics. I have started a programme themed: ‘Preparing for Release: everything you need to know’… it would be really good if we had excursions outside because they are not able to find out much inside here and then that just seems like an elementary question really. (Social worker in a women’s colony in central European Russia)

After an arduous experience of mobility and transportation, women prisoners arriving in correctional colonies enter a space where their life is ordered around a set of coerced institutional arrangements that operate with the intention of producing long-lasting change, but which do not engage with the structural and geographical dimensions of confinement that include distance from home, severed contacts with relatives, and abusive relationships. Modern psychological

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research has not yet permeated Russia’s penal periphery. Thus old-fashioned theories that seek to equate personality types with criminality come to be fused with a cultural sensibility that has yet to get to grips fully with the social context of women’s offending in Russia. What this means is that women’s offending can be both distorted (first through geographical disorientation, second through probing and testing, and third to cultural signifiers present in the fabric of the prison) and their pains of imprisonment increased.

Conclusion In this chapter and Chapter 11 we have outlined and examined the processes and practices that inform re-socialization in contemporary Russian women’s prisons. We have argued that personnel seek to share norms and values with the wider local and national culture and that these norms shape the methods employed to reform women. However, there is a stark difference between Western prison systems and Russian prisons with regard to the connections between inside and outside that have the potential to ensure that a safe, secure, and law-abiding life can be maintained upon release. Patterns of re-socialization across many European jurisdictions aim at enabling individual behaviour change organized around addressing ‘criminogenic need’ and offender management procedures. In Russian women’s prisons, behaviour change is, indeed, a goal but it is secondary to targeting a woman’s emotions and her psychological attitudes about being a woman, a mother, and a wife. In various ways women in Russian correctional colonies are perpetually being reminded that their children are waiting for them, that their youth and beauty are under threat, and their fertility is compromised—all as a result of leading a criminal lifestyle. Emotion therapy and basic psychological analysis, coupled with semi-compulsory cultural interventions, occupy the centre ground of re-socialization practice. The importance of this for how a woman responds to the unique penal geography of Russia should not be underestimated. The majority of the respondents to our questionnaire surveys were intending to return to their original place of domicile and, as Table12.2 shows, intended to find a job or enrol to study, live a ‘normal life’ free of crime, and devote themselves to the triad of home, family, children (dom, sem’ia, rebenek). However, upon re-entry they are vulnerable to becoming stuck in a perpetual liminal state because the quality of their life, at the final stage of reintegration, is stamped by the formative experience of incarceration. This is especially the case for those women who remain in the carceral zone and do not make it back to their former place of domicile, through either desire, or absence of documentation, or lack of somewhere to go.30 Such women become frozen in a perpetual state of geographical inertia and pain, because punishment has disconnected them from their previous self, family, and kin. Todd Clear’s observation, made in relation to the American penal system, is particularly apposite for Russia: that incarceration punches deep holes in women’s networks.

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The emotion therapy and the cultural activism on offer in women’s colonies under the guise of re-socialization are patently unequal to the task of plugging those holes.31

Notes 1. Kruttschnitt, C. and Vuolo, M., ‘The cultural context of women prisoners’ mental health: a comparison of two systems’, Punishment & Society, 9/2 (2007), p. 141. 2. Posadskaya, A., ‘The mythology of womanhood in contemporary “Soviet” culture, in A. Posadskaya and K. Clark (eds), Women in Russia: a New Era of Feminism (Verso: London, 1994), p. 126. 3. Carlen, P., Women’s Imprisonment: A Study in Social Control (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1983); Gelsthorpe, L., ‘Sentencing and gender’, in R. Sheehan, G. McIvor, and C. Trotter (eds), What Works with Women Offenders (Willan: Cullompton, 2007). 4. Pallot, J., Piacentini, L., and Moran, D., ‘Patriotic discourses in Russia’s penal peripheries: remembering the Mordovan gulag’, Europe-Asia Studies, 62/1 (2010), pp. 1–33. 5. Piacentini L., Surviving Russian Prisons: Punishment, Economy and Politics in Transition (Willan, Collumpton, 2004b); Piacentini, L., ‘Burden or benefit? Paradoxes of penal transition in Russia’, in K. McEvoy and L. McGregor (eds), Transitional Justice from Below: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change (Hart Publishing: Oxford, 2008). 6. This was obvious in, for example, lower ranks standing to attention when Major-General V. Mal’kov, head of the regional penal authority, entered the room; the bonding sessions for the 17 bosses of the correctional colonies that take place every month involving war games; and military parades on public holidays (see Pallot et al., op. cit.). 7. Goscilo, H., Dehexing Sex. Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 32–3. 8. Ibid. 9. Antonian, Iu. M., ‘Prestupnost’ sredi zhenshchy, Rossiiskoe pravo (1992), p. 217. 10. http://www.prav-news.ru/ekaterinodar/?id=15545 [accessed 15 November 2011]. 11. The Basis of the Social Concept at http://www.mospat.ru/en/documents/social-concepts/1x/ IX.3 [accessed 15 November 2011]. 12. See, for example, http://www.pravoslavie.ru/news/25154.htm [accessed 15 November 2011] which describes the intention of Nizhnii Novgorod oblast archbishopric to have a church in all 20 colonies in the oblast. 13. Brintlinger, A. and Conn, S., ‘Russian women: living in history’s shadow’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 2/3 (June 2001), pp. 94–102. 14. Waters, E., ‘Soviet beauty contests’, in I. Kon and J. Riordan (eds), Sex and Russian Society (Pluto Press: London, 1993), p. 122. 15. Moran, D., Pallot J., and Piacentini L., ‘Lipstick, lace and longing: constructions of femininity inside a Russian prison’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27/4 (2009), pp. 700–20. 16. During our fieldwork in Mordoviia, in IK14 we were treated to an abbreviated version of a show that the colony had recently prepared and performed: it consisted of song and dance acts by individual women or small groups. The songs were traditional Russian romances and dances ranged from ballet to modern ‘urban’ dance routines. Women made their costumes themselves or used clothes they had brought with them from the Sizo that they were permitted to reclaim for the purposes of the show. 17. Moran et al., op. cit., p. 712. 18. King, R. and McDermott, K., The State of our Prisons (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1995); Maruna, S., Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild (American Psychological Association: Washington, DC, 2001).

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19. Gelsthorpe, op. cit. 20. Blanchette, K. and Brown, S., The Assessment and Treatment of Women Offenders: An Integrative Perspective (John Wiley: Chichester, 2006). 21. Moran et al., op. cit., p. 713. 22. Ibid., p. 711. 23. Kazakova, V. A. Zhenshchiny, otbyvaiushchie lishenie svobody, Vypusk 5 (Iurisprudentsiia: Moscow, 2011), pp. 46 and 43. There are no returns for the number of prisoners given early release. 24. Gorelik, A. S., Osvobozhdenie ot otbivaniia nakazaniia (PRI: Moscow, 2007), p.15. 25. Ibid., p. 16. 26. Metodicheskie rekomendatsii po ispol’zovaniiu sistemy sotsial’nykh liftov v ispravitel’nykh uchrezhdeniiakh FSIN Rossii v usloviiakh deistvuiushchego zakonodatel’stva (per. MSS, 2011), p. 4. 27. Haney, C., ‘The contextual revolution in psychology and the question of prison effects’, in A. Liebling and S. Maruna (eds), The Effects of Imprisonment (Sage: London, 2005), p. 82. 28. Turner, V. W., Betwixt and Between: the Liminal Period in Rites de Passage in the Forest of Symbols (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1963). 29. Mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia: ‘Zhenshchiny v mestakh lisheniia svobody’ 11–13 oktobria 2007 (PRI: Moscow, 2008), p. 80. 30. Our questionnaire survey in the Mordoviian zone did not reveal any former prisoners, despite the fact that we had seen that there were prisoners who settled in the villages. In Pot’ma there is a residential home for former prisoners who have no home to go to. 31. Clear, T. R., Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighbours Worse (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007), p. 70.

13 Epilogue Russia’s giant penal territories that we have described in this book reveal an exceptional penal geography. Our study of how women experience this carceral geography identifies a relative neglect in the work of criminologists of meaningful and evidence-based discussion of how prisons respond to the language of human geography; that is, how relationships between people, history, and— crucially—place and space come to form new ideas about social control that are historically and culturally embedded. Garland’s path-breaking cultural analysis of punishment in the USA is a notable exception, although it must be added that his was not an empirical study and it did not include women in its history of the present-day penal system.1 At the centre of the analysis in this book is our reconceptualization of the experience of punishment as coercive mobilization; it is in the transportation process that spaces of punishment are created and absorbed by the soon-to-be-imprisoned bodies. We have attempted to show how, as they are moved through space, confined people become subject to diverse and dynamic regulations, experiences, ideas, and modes of understanding that are inextricably linked to the place of departure and the place of arrival. Prisoners, we have learned, experience punishment as a process and procedure that commences long before the incarcerative effects of confinement are fully realized. This is a new finding in penal sociology. Unlike conventional criminological scholarship, which tends to train attention on factors that affect former prisoners on return from custody and issues around re-settlement, our findings suggest that the points of eventual return are of less significance from a penal policy perspective than movement through space towards punishment. Furthermore, as our investigation has shown, Russia’s geography is shaped more by cultural and historical forces than by criminological matters: the long-existing linkages between the ideology of penal exile and modes of prisoner transport, from the theoretical perspective, tell us that penal transportation is imprisonment/punishment, because it carries forward to the present-day certain metaphors and ideas about discipline and banishment that create hidden communities of exiled women (and men), against whom a series of control measures and interventions are imposed that aim to synergize gender with law-abiding behaviour. With respect to the women prisoners who have been the focus of this study, we have shown that Russia’s geography of penality impacts disproportionately on them compared with men. It is not ‘simply’ a case of distance rupturing what are

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often already fragile family relationships and the bond between mother and child, but the other deprivations with which geographical isolation is associated— feelings of being ‘out of place’, liminality, and perpetual motion, even in the confined spaces of the colony—and the development of an introverted penal society that enhances the role of the regime and/or prison subculture in women’s identity construction. These are on top of other deprivations that affect all prisoners in Russia: poor relationships between prisoners and staff, serious deficiencies in medical care, ineffective social work due to small numbers of relevantly trained personnel in badly overcrowded colonies, and a ‘rehabilitation’ effort that is confined to a few lectures, narrowly focused skills training, which in the case of women focus on psychological ‘emotion therapy’ and cultural activities delivered en masse that reinforce traditional gender stereotypes and create an image for post-prison life of motherhood, home, and wifely rule at odds with what awaits prisoners when they are released. At various points in our narrative we have referred to FSIN’s latest concept for the development of the penal system to the year 2020 (Kontseptsiia razvitiia ugolov’no-ispolnitel’noi sistemy Rossiiskoi Federatsii do 2020). This reform proposal has come in the train of far-reaching reforms that have fundamentally changed the theory and practice of the justice system in the Russian Federation since the collapse of Communism. It is important not to underestimate their scale and depth. At the same time, the decades since 1991 have shown that progressive measures can be frustrated by vested interests, bureaucratic inefficiencies, corruption, and resource shortfalls. There is no reason to suppose that these problems will not continue to bear on the current reform effort. If though, for the sake of argument, we assume that the penal system will, indeed, be restructured in the way proposed in the ‘concept’, we need to examine how it will modify the picture of carceral Russia that we have presented in this book, and in particular its spatial or geographic aspects as they affect women. The ‘concept’ is presented by its authors as the ‘final removal of the vestiges of the gulag’. This is reflected in the rejection of collectivism and the movement towards a system of differentiated punishment according to the criminological characteristics and criminogenic needs of offenders. Instead of being accommodated in communal dormitories, the idea is that, henceforth, prisoners will be held in cells, individually or in small groups, in two categories of prison (tiur’my) and three categories of settlement-colony (koloniiposeleniia) in descending order of the seriousness of their offences and pattern of past offending. Juveniles will continue to be held separately from adults in education centres (vospital’nye tsentri) but will be moved on to adult colonies as soon as they achieve majority. The ‘concept’ includes proposals for other changes across the penal system, such as improved conditions of service for personnel, the introduction of modern surveillance systems, incentivizing prisoners toward good behaviour (through the system of ‘social lift’), upgrading medical, social, and psychological services, the restructuring of self-organization and skills training to focus them on prisoners’ individual needs, and the development of alternatives to incarceration. But the overriding aim of the concept is to break the power of the

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criminal subculture that has thrived in the communal, collectivist milieu of the barrack, and the method by which it seeks to do this is ‘panoptic’. In confining the correctional (labour) colony to history’s dustbin, the penal service is placing a wager on ‘the distribution of bodies in space’ to isolate gang leaders and reassert penal power where it has been eroded. It needs to be stressed that the lack of disciplinary control over prisoners which has eluded the penal service in recent years has been largely of the system’s own making, and has flourished in the lawlessness and corruption of the post-Soviet state. Addressing the problem is long overdue. However, for all the rhetoric about humanization and individualization of punishment, the ‘concept’ delivers a one-size-fits-all reform that perpetuates the marginalization of policy-making in relation to minority groups, including women. It is also worth observing that the section on alternatives to incarceration occupies two pages of the 28-page-long document. The first observation that can be made about the ‘concept’ with respect to women and geography is that, although it states that one of its aims is the ‘optimization of the geographical distribution of facilities in order to preserve prisoners’ socially useful connections’, no spatial restructuring of the physical infrastructure at the macro level is proposed; optimization will take place largely within the framework of the existing penal facilities. The second observation is that the ‘concept’ is more or less silent on the potential impact of its proposals on women prisoners. If we were looking for an acknowledgement that women prisoners have been disproportionately affected by Russia’s carceral geography, it is not to be found in the ‘concept’. Women, in fact, barely figure in the document. The auguries are, therefore, not good; as we noted in Chapter 3, the justice system’s response to rising women’s criminality and prison overcrowding is to open new women’s correctional colonies, many duplicating the location of existing women’s facilities. We know from the ‘concept’ that the intention is to differentiate women’s punishment—serious offenders and recidivists will be sent to category two prisons (tiur’my) whilst women convicted of medium to less serious offences will be separated in the three categories of colony-settlement—but the document does not explain how differentiation will be made compatible with the placing of women prisoners in facilities that will enable them to sustain their socially-useful ties. It is not obvious that any significant improvement is in prospect without recourse being made to mixed male/ female institutions, which have their own problems for women. The dearth of research in Russia on women prisoners’ experiences means that lacunae in policy documents with respect to women remain unchallenged by academic enquiry, and the sorts of questions that we have raised in this book remain unexplored by all but a small minority of dedicated independent researchers. Whilst we did not observe any human rights harms during our fieldwork, we had ongoing concerns about whether the current practice and process of coercive mobilization to remote peripheries violate human rights norms concerned with the humane treatment of prisoners and minimum standards. The Russian government remains committed to penal reform and, as we have already observed, has made notable positive steps in judicial reform. However, this has not gone far

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enough to include reforms of transportation and sentencing prisoners out of region—which affects women more acutely than men. Existing women-friendly provisions in the criminal and correction codes, such as giving women suspended or delayed sentences (otsrochka) in order to care for a child under the age of 14, are underutilized, as are provisions for furloughs. The improvement of practice in these respects would represent a substantial step in the right direction for women offenders. DMR units and family visitation schemes are also in need of urgent reform. Not only are women struggling to maintain contacts with their children, but the penal measures we came across are designed around a mode of rehabilitation that is aimed at re-animating ‘maternal instincts’ in women. Women prisoners are served with perpetual reminders of their failings both as law-abiding citizens and as mothers who have disrupted their families. This, it would seem to us, constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment and is potentially a violation of article 3 of the International Convention on Human Rights. Women’s choices with regard to children’s care that we describe in this book are, in reality, extremely constrained because they are held inside regimes that make it impossible for visitations to take place. Meanwhile, the units designed to allow babies and mothers to remain together until the age of three do not, in reality, permit women to ‘be mothers’, but subject them to the same controls over their use of time and space as other prisoners. Russian exceptionalism is frequently forwarded as a reason why the experience of Russia is discounted in many areas of social, political, and geographic enquiry. And it is true that the story we have told here of women’s incarceration has many unusual features. However, given that women occupy, on average, 4–8 per cent of national prison populations, it must follow that a degree of emotional, physical, and penological distanciation occurs in the punishment process in most other jurisdictions also. Furthermore, since prison scholarship clearly shows that exclusion, in the form of incarceration, often leads to further social exclusion postcustody if prisoners remain out of contact with home, this feature of women’s carceral geography must be an element in the failure of prisons ‘to work’. Russia is an extreme case of a universal problem: the sheer size of the country, combined with a high and rising female imprisonment rate, results in a particularly severe spatial dislocation, involving penal transportation that is punitive and painful. It is precisely the exaggeration of ‘the distance variable’ in Russia that exposes the impact which penal geography can have on the experiences of incarceration. The universal relevance of this experience becomes all the more significant when the effects are taken into account of the globalization of punishment, with rising proportions of prisoners held outside their country of birth. A disappointing feature of the Russian case is that the post-Soviet policymakers should have failed so abjectly to take up the challenge posed by the country’s size and geography; having inherited a penal infrastructure designed to expel prisoners to the peripheries, the post-Soviet state tackled the problems this geography posed to the humanization of punishment by a series of minor ‘fixes’: building facilities for conjugal visits, inserting telephones, optimizing the distribution

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of prisoners within the existing structure, and reclassifying facilities. The current reform ‘concept’ continues this approach. Rather than admit that, given Russia’s size, the geographical circle cannot in fact be squared, the latest ‘solution’ to the distance problem that the ‘concept’ trumpets is to allow prisoners to use skype to keep in touch with their relatives. The response to Russia’s penal geography that would have really signalled the rejection of the gulag inheritance would have been for the state to invest in the development of sensible and workable alternatives to incarceration, reserving prison for only the most serious persistent and repeat offenders, or the violent and unstable who commit serious and damaging offences. This would have allowed the islands of the archipelago finally and irrevocably to have been evacuated and the more accessible colonies converted into prisons for those who really needed to be isolated from society. Among other things, it would bring to an end the obscenity of sending girls aged 14–18 some thousands of kilometres from their home town to serve too long sentences. As it is, the islands of the archipelago are still populated and seem likely to remain so in the future. Meanwhile, women are set to be a growing section of the archipelago’s population, but, as a minority, they will struggle to attract the attention that is needed to develop appropriate strategies centred on their needs. Given the hold the matrioshka ethos has over the minds of personnel in the prison service, and indeed of the broader Russian society, the prospects for the development of interventions that are relevant to the realities of the lives of the women who find themselves in prison are, it is sad to say, not promising.

Notes 1. Garland, D., The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001).

Appendix 1 The current prisoner interviewees Prisoner code

Age

Length of sentence yrs/mths

Type of penal instituion

Pr 1 Pr 2 Pr 3 Pr 4 Pr 5 Pr 6 Pr 7 Pr 8 Pr 9 Pr 10 Pr 11 Pr 12 Pr 13 Pr 14 Pr 15 Pr 16 Pr 17 Pr 18 Pr 19 Pr 20 Pr 21 Pr 22 Pr 23 Pr 24 Pr 25 Pr 26 Pr 27 Pr 28 Pr 29 Pr 30 Pr 31 Pr 32 Pr 33 Pr 34 Pr 35 Pr 36 Pr 37** Pr 38**

43 26 34 44 35 26 51 35 47 27 50 35 48 31 n/d 34 33 32 60 48 31 30 45 43 27 35 32 n/d 31 n/d n/d n/d 27 n/d 49 46 17 17

4/5 5/0 4 5/5 12 7 10 n/d 8 n/d 3 5 18 7/5 n/d n/d n/d 12 19 12 14 7 8 18 7 7/5 5 n/d 7/5 4/3 5/10 n/d 8 14 7 10 2/3 6

K-P IK IK IK K-P IK K-P IK K-P IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK K-P IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK

Article* Married or (not subpartnered at section) time of interview 114 166 228 158 105 228 228 n/d 105 228 159 105 105 163 n/d n/d n/d 105 105 105 105 228 111 105 n/d 228 105 105 n/d n/d n/d n/d n/d 105 105 222 161 116/7

No No Yes Yes No Yes No No No No No No No No n/d Yes Yes Yes n/d No n/d Yes No Yes No No No n/d No n/d n/d Yes No Yes No n/d No No

Interview team UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK UK Russian Russian Russian Russian

Cont.

262 Prisoner code Pr 39 Pr 40 Pr 41 Pr 42 Pr 43 Pr 44 Pr 45 Pr 46 Pr 47 Pr 48 Pr 49 Pr 50 Pr 51 Pr 52 Pr 53 Pr 54 Pr 55 Pr 56 Pr 57 Pr 58 Pr 59 Pr 60 Pr 61 Pr 62 Pr 63 Pr 64 Pr 65

Appendix 1: The current prisoner interviewees Age

Length of sentence yrs/mths

Type of penal instituion

38 34 22 48 29 29 48 34 23 16 n/d 17 26 28 26 28 40 29 29 27 23 22 27 n/d 38 29 n/d

4 2 6 17 4 n/d 11 2/5 5/5 2/5 n/d n/d n/d 11 7/3 1/8 20 5/5 2/5 7/5 5/1 3 4 18 12 7 n/d

IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK VK VK VK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK IK

Article* Married or (not subpartnered at section) time of interview 111 111 n/d 105 n/d 111 105 228 228 162 n/d 158 n/d 111 228 158 n/d 159 228 162 228 111 n/d 105 105 228 n/d

Yes No n/d n/d n/d Yes n/d No No No n/d No No No No n/d Yes Yes n/d No No No Yes No Yes No n/d

Interview team Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian Russian

*We only give here the more serious article if a woman was sentenced under more than one article of the criminal code. ** These subjects were interviewed twice. IK = correctional colony K-P = Colony-settlement VK = Juvenile colony

(The table does not include the girls interviewed at the L’govo colony in 2007, for whom these data were not collected. They are numbered in the text VK 1–30.) Key to the article in the criminal code: Article

Offence

105 116 111 131/132 158 159 161 162 163 166 222 228

Premeditated murder Battery Premeditated bodily harm Rape and sexual assault Theft Fraud Robbery Robbery with violence Extortion Traffic offences Weapons offences Illegal trade in narcotics and psychotrophic substances Possession of drugs

232

Appendix 2 The former prisoner interviewees

Prisoner code Ex-Pr 1** Ex-Pr 2** Ex-Pr 3** Ex-Pr 4 Ex-Pr 5 Ex-Pr 6 Ex-Pr 7 Ex-Pr 8 Ex-Pr 9 Ex-Pr 10 Ex-Pr 11 Ex-Pr 12 Ex-Pr 13 Ex Pr 14 Ex-Pr 15 Ex-Pr 16 Ex-Pr 17 Ex-Pr 18 Ex-Pr 19 Ex-Pr 20 Ex-Pr 21 Ex-Pr 22 Ex-Pr 23 Ex-Pr 24

Age when interviewed

Article*

21 55 55 25 36 48 20 51 52 37 32 48 48 37 50 33 34 23 31 34 26 24 24 31

105 158 158 160 228 105 162 159 228 228 228 105 228 228 105 228 105 158 228 228 161 111 158 228

Length of sentence yrs/months 6/5 2/0 2/0 2/0 4/2 10/0 5/0 5/5 3/5 8/0 5/5 10 6/0 1/8 12/0 5/3 9/0 1/9 4/0 2 5 4/4 2 4/0

Time served yrs/months

Year released

5/5 2/0 2/0 2/0 2/5 8/0 3/5 3/5 2/2 6/0 3/0 8 3/0 1/8 7/5 4/7 6/0 1/9 8/0 4/5 5 5 2 8/0

2008 2009 2009 2003 2009 2000 2008 2007 2001 2007 2005 2000 2005 1999 2008 2004 2000 2005 2004 2005 2001 2002 2006 2004

* We only give here the more serious article if a woman was sentenced under more than one article of the criminal code. **These subjects were interviewed twice.

Marital status (old/new partner) No Same-sex partner Same-sex partner Partner/new Husband No Partner/new Husband/same Divorced Husband/new No No Husband/new Husband/new Partner/new No Same-sex partner Husband/new Partner No Husband/new No n/d Partner

Appendix 3 Calculation of visiting rate of prisoners receiving visits in IK2 and IK14, Mordoviia Sentence in yrs/ mths

5 13 12 5/6 15 2 3 7 3 4 14 5 3–6 5–4 12 6 6 6 6 6 1–6 8 7 6–6 14 7 8 5–6 6 9 8 11–2 5

Served (rounded to nearest quarter) 1.5 9.75 9 2.25 10 1.75 2.75 3 1.25 1.5 10 1 0.75 3.25 7.75 2.75 4.0 4.5 2.75 2.75 0.75 3 3 2 4 4.5 3.25 2.75 4.25 4.75 3.75 7.75 2.75

Average annual number of short visits

Average annual number of long visits

– 1.0 0.2 2.6 0.1 2.3 1.1 0.3 4.0 0.25 – 4 4 0.3 1.0 2.5 3.0 1.3 2.9 2.9 4.0 – 0.6 – 0.75 – 1.85 5.45 1.8 – 0.5 0.2 0.4

1.3 1.5 0.1 1.3 – – – 0.6 1.6 – 0.1 2 2.6 4.0 – 0.7 2.0 0.2 0.2 2.1 1.3 3.6 0.6 1.5 0.5 1.3 3.0 3.6 0.2 2.5 4.0 1.3 2.2

Well connected

Moderately connected

Weakly connected

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Cont.

266 Sentence in yrs/ mths

6 2–6 4–6 6 4–6 5 2–6 8–6 6–6 7 6

Appendix 3: Calculation of visiting rate of prisoners Served (rounded to nearest quarter) 3 0.75 2.5 0.75 1.25 2.0 1.5 1.0 4.5 3.5 2.0

Average annual number of short visits – – 2.8 2.6 – 4.5 0.6 – 0.4 – 2.0

Average annual number of long visits 0.3 2.8 1.2 1.4 1.6 2.0 0.6 1 1.1 2.8 2.5

Well connected

Moderately connected

Weakly connected

* * * * * * * * * * * 20 (45.5%)

10 (22.7%)

14 (31.8%)

Well connected: Frequency meets 25% of the entitlement, i.e. an aggregate of 7 visits per annum in any combination of long and short visits where 1 long visit = 4 short visits. Moderately connected: An aggregate of 3.5 visits per annum where 1 long visit = 4 short visits. Weakly connected: Fewer than 3.5 visits per annum where 1 long visit = 4 short visits.

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INDEX abandonment: children 174–5, 180, 186, 191, 193 prisoners 174–6, 194, 180, 194 Academy of Law and Penal Management in Riazan’ (Riazan’ Academy) viii, 21, 22–4, 26, 27, 37–9, 41 ‘activities’ (meropriiatiia) see also interventions with local authority 86, 88, 103 in prisons 108, 183, 223, 227, 229, 238, 239, 242, 244–9, 257 Abramkin, Valerii 57, 68 aerobics classes 218, 243 Agamben, Giorgio 110 alcoholism 7, 121, 172, 191, 212, 227, 238 alcohol 172, 212, 227 Altai 62–3 Al’pern, Lydmilla 6, 8, 21, 113, 139, 183, 200 Alford, Fred 100 amnesties 2, 51, 130 Anderson, Clare 66 Andrews, Donald Arthur 68 Antonian, Iu 213 annual beauty pageants: see beauty contests appeals against sentence 31, 55, 136, 155 archipelago 2, 3, 13, 15, 49, 50, 51, 54, 65, 73–4, 77, 78, 146, 182, 260 Arctic Circle 92, 156 Arestant website 65, 71–2, 179 Arhkangel’sk 57, 193 Attwood, Lynn 5 avtozek 149, 183 babies: see children of prisoners banishment 47–9, 146, 256 Baltic coast 51 Barashevo 76, 80–2 Barth, Fredrik 91 Bashkiriia 169 beauty contests 196, 236, 237, 242–7, 261 Beckett, Katherine 48

bedding 66, 142, 111, 126, 130, 111, 142 see also bunk bed bio-politics 33, 97, 105, 112 Bolshevik Revolution 48 Briansk 62, 145 brigade 5, 10, 78, 92, 98, 105, 113, 115, 205, 240 Brookman, Fiona 129 bunk bed 108, 113, 124, 126, 147, 154, 182, 201, 206, 211, 214 see also bedding bureaucratic dynamics vii, 10, 19, 23, 78, 140, 257 camp, labour 4, 5, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 66, 69, 70 f.n. 17, 74–8, 83, 86, 91, 94 f.n. 8, 96, 98, 133, 137 f.n. 6, 182, 198, 200, 206–7, 217 f.n. 7, 223, 248 see also gulag corrective labour 121 katorga 3, 48, 146 see also penal servitude peripheral locations 3, 51 psychiatric hospitals 50, 224 Speranskii reforms 48 special settlements 50 work settlements 50, 78 Canada 3, 64, 42, 268 carceral archipelago 49, 73, 182 ‘island societies’ 75 Carlen, Pat 20, 24 CCTV (electronic surveillance) 103, 149, 237 Cheliabinsk 144, 145, 169, 246 Chita 57 children of prisoners 6, 7, 173, 180 passim, 194, 196 f.n. 28, 200, 223, 247, 252, 253 see also, mother-and-baby houses in camps 5 in care 181, 192–94 babies 5, 16, 124, 137 f.n. 13, 181 passim, 183–8, 194, 259

282

Index

childcare issues 29 impact on 180–1 Infants 182, 183, 187, 188 legal provision for 9, 10, 12, 166, 247, 259 maintaining contact with 14, 123, 128, 146, 168, 170, 171, 175, 177, 259 relationship with 16, 123, 180–95, 189, 203, 239, 240 separation from 146, 164, 177, 180, 181 visits from 188–92 Chuvashiia 14, 169 clandestine trials 121 Clemmer, Donald 156 coercive mobilisation 64, 136, 256, 258 collectivity (kollektiv) 36, 97, 105, 108, 109 Collins, Jennifer, M. 9 colony-settlements 8, 56, 59, 64, 67, 71 f.n. 25, 92, 100, 230, 233, 235 f.ns 30 & 31, 262 communal dormitories 13, 16, 203, 232, 257 correction, of prisoners 13, 40, 154, 203, 219, 221, 222 passim, 229, 236, 237–38, 245, 247, 248 correctional colonies see also prisons, colony-settlements, and juvenile colonies allocation of prisoners to 14 categories of 13, 56, 58, 111, 117, 124, 143, 196 internal territory of 100–3 location and distribution of 15, 38, 43 f.n. 19, 50, 57, 74 passim, 194, 198 number and location of women’s 8, 59–64, 258 corruption 33, 47, 106, 123, 129, 213, 257, 258 in remand cells 129–33 courts 6, 8, 92, 130, 140, 142, 181, 193 Crewe, B 198 crime 12, 13, 20, 21, 57, 75, 153, 165, 219, 220, 223–6, 236–7, 240, 249, 253 confess to 123, 131, 132 reduction of 68, 150, 219 women’s 6, 8, 9, 20, 141, 208, 210, 225, 237, 238 criminal executive inspectorate 124 criminal correction code 2, 3, 9, 10, 12, 13, 47, 63, 106, 111, 140, 164, 202, 216 f.n. 5, 222, 259 criminal procedure code 11, 126 cultural and social community 79 cultural antecedents and values 20

deviancy 47, 68, 202 ‘ordinary criminals’ 49, 224 deportation 47, 49, 50 see also banishment and exile detachment (otriad) 10, 33, 36, 38, 98, 99–111, 113, 114, 115, 134, 151–5, 163, 164, 177, 183, 192, 198–208, 210, 211, 212, 214, 219, 227, 229, 230, 231, 242–4, 246, 248, 251 see also dormitories leader (nachal’nik) 37, 99, 105, 226 De Verteuil, G. de 68 Dirsuweit, T. 113 discrimination 6, 206 distanciation 146, 259 DMR: see mother-and-baby houses docile bodies: see bio-politics dormitories, communal 15, 33, 36, 98, 102, 104, 105, 108, 112, 113, 114, 152, 186, 201, 204, 205 Downes, D. 128 early release 37, 182, 183, 205, 211, 212, 226, 233, 244, 247, 248, 255 East Siberia 51 Economic and Social Research Council vii, 24 see also ESRC Ekaterinburg 144, 145 emotional well-being 127, 225 entertainment 11, 12, 105, 242–3, 245, 246 Engels, Fredrich 98 etap, etapirovanie: see transportation ethnicity 49, 50, 87, 209 European Russia 51, 57, 61, 62, 82, 158, 250 exile 2, 3, 5, 43 f.n. 23, 47–50, 54, 69 f.n. 5, 77, 137 f.n. 6, 146, 147, 156, 256 see also banishment social and ethnic deportations 50 facilities 2, 8, 11, 12, 13, 47, 55, 56, 57, 58, 56, 62, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 83, 94 f.n. 13, 101, 102, 124, 125, 132, 134, 139, 140, 141, 143, 148, 183, 219, 233, 245, 258, 259, 260 families 3, 6, 16, 61, 64, 84, 165, 168, 170, 172, 174, 180, 194, 199, 209, 226, 232, 234, 250, 259 alimony 190, 191, 193 care organs 181, 193, 199 courts 6, 8, 92, 130, 140, 142, 181, 193, 278 family contact 163, 180 foster parents 192 parental rights 166, 181, 193, 194 parent (open) days 79, 190

Index separation of mothers from their babies 18, 64, 68, 75, 97, 122, 146, 164, 171, 180–1, 183, 186, 192–5, 212, 228 State guardianship 181, 193 support for families in prison 180 Far East 51, 66, 69, 91, 92 Far North 52, 57, 59, 142, 146 feminist scholarship 6, 19, 29, 112, 164, 180, 196 f.n. 28, 242 Ferrero, Guglielmo 237 Foucault, Michel 2, 48, 70 f.n. 12, 97, 99, 110, 122, 136, 150, 270 Foucauldian 4, 106, 116, 122, 151, 247 forms of knowledge 16, 122 feelings of disempowerment 178, 185, 192 Federal Penal Service (FSIN) 3, 7, 8, 12, 17, 24, 34, 55–6, 58, 61, 72, 105, 111–2, 117, 125, 127–8, 137, 138, 140–3, 166, 179, 181, 210, 222–4, 229, 233, 239, 241, 245, 253, 257 gangs (criminal) 5, 112, 130 see also thieves-in-law Garland, David 96, 122, 221, 256 gender 4, 5, 9, 27, 29, 33, 37, 59, 153, 155, 203, 204, 218, 232, 233, 236, 256 acting out gender roles, 204, 245 -based problems 6, 113, 209, 220, 226, 229, 231, 241, 252 biology 238 biologically defective 237 cake baking 243 care-givers 166, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 190 cultural activities 88, 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 257 cultural image of womanhood 238 daughter 158, 173, 176, 238 dance 73, 238, 244, 254 Devochka (‘The Girl’) 7, 16, 63 feminine virtues 244 Matrioshka ethos 4, 7, 14, 242, 137, 260 needlepoint 243 stereotyping 19, 188 gendered attitudes 4, 5, 29, 219, 226, 232, 257 approaches to incarceration 16, 19, 20, 165, 247 identities 20, 173, 176, 200, 236, 237 performances 243–6 practices 249 structures 245 Gentes, Andrew 48 geographer 15, 22, 28, 64, 91, 146

283

geography 2, 3, 4, 14–16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 37, 38, 40, 47, 49, 51, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78, 90, 121, 145, 146, 168, 198, 218, 219, 226, 230, 250, 253, 256, 258, 259, 260 see also space, place geographical processes 198 geographical distributions 47, 56, 258 Ginzburg, Evgeniia 66, 68, 98, 100, 147, 149 Goffman, Erving 200 globalization 64, 158, 259 Gorkii 50 governmentality 10, 97 responsibilization 19, 100, 106, 221, 223 Gorbachev, Mikhael 5, 91, 243 Granovskaia, Liudmila 1, 77 gulag 3, 5, 65, 77, 116, 146, 198, 217 see also camps anniversary celebrations 75 Dubravlag 73, 74, 91 islands 57, 73, 74–5, 78, 92, 260 Solvetskii (Solovki) 50, 77 Komi Republic 51, 57, 156 Pechorlag 77 Temnikovskii lager’ 73 see also Dubravlag Siberia 62, 51 Urals 51, 61, 67 penal architecture 2, 54 victims of 66, 67 work settlements 50, 78 see also Temnikovskii lager’ gypsies 205, 206, 209 Herbert, Steven 48, 146 hierarchical order in colonies 16, 103, 105, 108, 112, 199, 206 passim see also social relationships activists (aktivisti) 108, 210, 211, 212, 222, 247 ‘blatnye’ 207, 212 bullying 4, 11, 33, 112 ‘garbage’ (musorskie) 209 informers (stukachi) 106, 108, 110, 132, 207, 247 prefects (starshaia dneval’naia) 108, 115, 131, 132, 198, 210, 211, 212, 222 prison sub-culture 21, 105 ‘rats’ (krysy) 209 ‘sheep’ (sherstianye) 207 thieves-in-law 110, 198, 206, 207, 212 HIV positive 121 Holt, Norman 163

284

Index

Home colony as 158, 159, 160–3, 163, 172, 176, 177, 207 contact with 27, 32, 127, 142, 146, 163 passim, 190, 201, 205, 228, 231, 252, 259, 260 distance from 2, 16, 30, 54, 59, 61–3, 64, 66, 71 f.n. 28, 127,153, 155, 169, 198, 235 f.n. 30, 250 leaving 147 human rights 1, 10, 11, 40, 54, 75, 96, 105, 128, 133, 136, 222, 224 European law 129, 138, 270 European penal and legal norms 11 European practices 16 human rights lawyers 128 international standards 3 legal rights 129 minimum conditions of confinement 11 monitoring and minimum standards 133 overcrowding in the Sizo 11 procuracy 130 Russian law 7, 130 hygiene 5, 33, 130, 155, 206, 209 sanitary products 10, 128, 209 soap 134 toilets 108, 209, 210 washing 104, 131, 134, 148, 210, 229 Iangary 64 Iaroslavl’ 145 identity 5, 14, 20, 28, 33, 34, 64, 89, 91–3, 132–4, 140, 142, 146, 147, 149, 158, 159, 163, 177, 193, 194, 201, 204, 206, 236, 237, 250, 257 identity construction 14, 64, 159, 163, 177, 257 interventions 28, 75, 100, 110, 142, 181, 204, 220, 226, 229, 232, 236–7, 242, 246, 249, 253, 256, 260 see also activities institutional newspaper (Dubrava) 74, 240 International Women’s Day 243 Irkutsk 57 island prisons 48, 64, 66, 71 Solovetskii islands 50, 77 Ivanovo 144, 145, 205 Jewish Autonomous Oblast 57 Jewkes, Yvonne 100 journeys to prison 2, 16, 27, 49, 50, 64, 65, 123, 128, 133, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 159, 169, 170, 182, 186 see also mobility and transportation

distance 141–7 time taken 147–9 Judges 11, 243, 245 Juvenile colonies x, 58, 60, 105, 113, 163, 251 see also L’govo and Novyi Oskol Kaluga 205 Kazakhstan 51, 94, 144, 145 Khlevniuk, Oleg 4 Khordokovsky, Mikhael 47, 65 Khrushchev, Nikita 4, 50, 54, 121, 219 King, Roy 11 Kizel 59 Kirchheime, Otto 150 Kirov 144–5 Konovalov, Alexander 54, 110 Komi 51, 57, 59, 62, 156 f.n. 9, 191, 205, 206 kolkhoz 97 Koslovka 169 Krasnoiarsk 57 Kruttschnitt, Candace 220, 236 KVN (klub veselykh i nakhodchivykh) 242, 243, 245 Kudymkar 59 Kurgan 61, 177 labour, penal 5, 10, 21, 48, 50, 51, 54, 59, 84, 98, 101, 114, 121, 124, 198, 209, 223, 225 see also penal industries brigades 5, 77 Centres of Labour Adaptation 223 hard labour 48, 59, 76, 146, 223 informal labour market 210 non-convoy 77, 84, 233 PoW 59 as rehabilitation 151, 164 prisoners’ work in colonies 5, 9, 12, 39, 48, 66, 67, 68, 77, 84, 91, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 113, 114, 115, 128, 135, 149, 151, 152, 154, 163, 169, 170, 173, 183, 185, 186, 189–90, 200, 201, 206, 207, 212, 213, 216, 222, 223–225, 226, 233, 237, 244, 246 Lacey, Nicola 236 landscapes, physical 11, 66, 146 deserts 66, 77 forests 73, 77, 82, 177, 233 mines 77 steppe 77 tundra 67, 77 legal status of prisoners 139, 222 see also human rights Leib, Ethan J. 9

Index Lefebvre, Henri 64 lesbianism 201–4 see also sexual relationships Liebling, Alison 23, 164, 213, 215,197 Lindquist, C. 164 L’govo 12, 26, 28, 29, 37, 38, 39, 42 f.n. 12, 61, 113, 114, 129, 142, 144, 146, 148, 149, 163, 169, 176, 205, 230, 243, 261 local government reform 15, 85 municipal administration 85 public sector worker 89 Lombrosso, Cesare 237, 238 ‘Madonna or whore’ dilemma 236 Magadan 51, 70, 75 male gaze 245 Mal’kov, Major General V.A. 11, 37, 86, 73, 254 f.n. 6 Markel, D. 9 Marx, Karl 98, 177, 239 Marxism/Leninism 239 McAuley, Mary vii, 21 McDermott, Kathleen 128, 244 Medvesdskaia, Kseniia 98 meropriiatiia: see activities metaphor 3, 6, 49, 78, 224, 237, 256 Mikhlin, Alexander Solomonovich 40, 165 Miller, Donald 163 Ministry of Internal Affairs 4, 10, 73, 91, 125 Ministry of Justice vii, 10, 91, 103–5, 110 federal funding 11 Ministry of Railways 140 ‘mobilities turn’, the 121 coerced mobility 121–2, 141–2, 156 mobile penal power 122 Mochulsky, F. V. 77 Mordoviia, Republic of 22, 51, 57, 62, 63, 68, 73–7, 87, 148, 169, 171–7, 183, 185, 189, 197, 214, 222, 226, 227, 228, 237, 239, 252, 254 f.n. 16, 255 f.n. 30 Moscow 1, 4, 11, 15, 47, 51, 53, 57, 61, 64, 68, 69, 70, 73, 76, 81, 87, 92, 124, 142, 144, 145, 148, 170, 181, 185, 186, 195, 205 mothers and motherhood 5, 8, 9, 158, 168, 175–6, 180–8, 190, 193, 194, 195, 225, 238, 240, 251, 259, 267–9, 271 bad mothers 180, 182 good mothers 238 maternal instinct 186, 238, 259 maternal love 183, 184 maternal role 181, 196

285

mothering skills 187, 243 ‘natural mother’ 182, 183 pregnant women prisoners 5, 182–3, 247 mother-and-baby houses (DMR) 12, 101, 105, 181, 183–8, 193, 259 Mozhaisk 142, 188 Mukhina, V. 180, 188 Murmansk 205 museums 4, 74, 83, 90, 237 Nagar, Richa 22 Nazi concentration camps 49, 70 f.n. 12, 198, 200 German PoW labour 59 World War II 49, 207 Nizhnii Novgorod 145 NGOs vii, viii, 14, 36, 37, 68, 188, 195 f.n. 18, 234, 146, 248 NKVD 50, 75, 77, 78, 94 f.n. 9, 207 non-Western jurisdictions 219 North Caucasus 51 Novyi Oskol 39, 62, 71 f.n. 28, 112, 113, 114, 146, 159, 160–2, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171, 214, 230, 252 nurseries 9, 181,183, 184, 186, 187 see also mother-and-baby houses breastfeeding 5, 183, 185 care givers 166, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 189, 190 health professionals 87, 183, 186, 232 nurses 183 Obshchak (social fund) 110, 124, 207 Oleinik, Oleg 205, 213 open prisons 8, 35, 58, 92, 93, 102, 219 see also colony-settlements Operations service (Operativnaia sliuzhba) 101, 106, 108, 131, 132, 151, 212 operativnik 106, 132 Omsk 145, 205 Omel’chenko, Elena vii, 21, 204 Oxley, Anne 59 Pacific coast 51 Pallot, Judith 29, 42 f.n. 12 panoptic process 2, 97–9, 112, 199, 212 enhanced panopticism 97–9, 199, 212 parades 113, 243, 246, 254 f.n. 6 parade ground 101, 103, 104, 113 roll call 10, 103, 104, 106, 173, 183 parcels 10, 111, 117 f.n. 22, 200, 208, 209, 235 f.n. 31 see also postal communications with home patriarchal frameworks 237

286

Index

Pechora 59 Pelekhova, Iulia 181 penal continuum 122 penal phasing 16, 122, 136, 156 penality 14, 15, 19, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 62, 64, 66, 68, 74, 76, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 92, 98, 100, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 124 penal industries 80, 104 see also labour clothing manufacture 101, 102, 222, 223 employment opportunities in 88, 251 forestry 76, 80, 82 metallurgy 80, 101 sewing 115, 128, 130, 170, 223, 251 souvenirs 101 wood processing 80, 101 penal power 33, 98, 99, 100, 105, 108, 112, 121, 122, 123, 199, 203, 210, 213, 238, 242, 247, 258 penal reforms 3, 8, 15, 42, 54, 75, 83, 92, 110, 112, 128, 130, 136, 141, 155, 164, 165, 188, 233, 235 f.n. 31, 236, 257, 258, 259, 260 in relation to women 11–12, 247, 259 Penal Reform International 246 Penal Service vii, 7, 15, 16, 21, 23, 24, 25, 31, 34, 39, 40, 47, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 92, 130, 140, 149, 151, 181, 187, 224, 229, 230, 239, 240, 243, 249 see also FSIN penal servitude (katorga) 3, 48, 146 Penal zones (sub-regions) 37, 38, 39, 51, 68, 76, 78–9, 92, 245 co-community with local population 38, 89, 93 public gaze 68, 93, 112, 113 in depressed rural periphery 83 symbolic boundaries of 89, 90, 91 penal zoning 139, 155 peripheries 47, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56, 59, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, 75, 82, 93, 233, 258, 259 landscapes of 66, 72, 116, 146 penal zones in 22, 25, 37, 65, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 91, 92, 114, 233 temperature in 66, 130, 148, 233 Perm’ krai 14, 17 f.n. 6, 57, 58, 59, 67, 91, 92, 137 f.n. 6, 144, 146 Perm’ city 59, 67 personnel 58, 74, 75, 77–8, 87, 101, 106, 107, 219, 228, 237, 251, 253, 257 dynastic families of 57, 86 guards (okhrana) 4, 5, 10, 11, 65, 73, 74, 84, 87, 88, 94 f.n. 9, 101, 116, 142, 147, 148, 155, 183, 216, 233, 237, 245

military rank 10, 228 privileges of 84 relationship with prisoners 16, 213–4 recruitment 87–9 personnel, attitudes towards: colony-settlements 93 detachment 113, 134, 198 distance 153, 174, 193, 194 prison as redemption 176, 240 rehabilitation 176, 225, 226, 230, 231–2, 237, 245, 247 self-organization 108–9, 131, 210, 211, 223 sexual relationships 202–3, 204 women prisoners 16, 33, 108, 129, 141, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187, 189, 218, 219, 226, 227, 260 Piacentini, Laura ix, 21, 29 Pierpont, Harriet 137 place 2, 14, 16, 20, 24, 30, 49, 50, 51, 54, 57, 61–4, 64–7, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 197, 200, 256 see also home displacement 158, 159 double isolation 163, 225, 242 favourite 112, 113–5, 154, 240, 242 feeling out of place/in place 69, 127,153, 157, 159, 177, 257 identity 64, 89, 158–9, 160–3, 176–7, 250 loyalty to 74, 89, 92 prison as a negative place 68, 82, 125, 130, 159, 162, 163, 177, 185 remote 13, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 59, 65, 67, 82, 168, 198 political correction 236–7 Pot’ma 1, 40, 73, 76, 80, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90, 148, 255 f.n. 30 Posadskaya, Anastasia 254 postal communication (with home) 30, 113, 135, 167, 168, 191, 194, 201 letters 135, 158, 171, 174, 176, 191, 192, 193, 201, 231, 251 parcels 30, 32, 164, 165–7, 169, 200, 208–9 power-and-control 105–6 prison : see also correctional colony, juvenile colony, remand prison everyday forms of resistance in 33, 99 general cells 124 see also dormitories IVS (temporary holding cells) 123, 125–9, 131, 133, 135, 139 IVS jargon 31, 32, 36, 99, 106, 133, 199, 204, 206, 207, 209, 210 Patuxent prison 101 press huts in 132, 209 punishment cells in 110, 111, 115

Index ‘red’ and ‘black’ 105, 213 sentences 56, 128, 167, 199, 241 siting of 75, 78 specialist facilities 55, 56 TB in 11, 56, 148 Tiur’ma 56, 132 transit prison 15, 78, 140, 143 prisoners: acclimatizing to life in prison 93 adaptation 16, 28, 100, 109, 116, 127, 139, 150 passim, 160–3,164, 165, 186, 194, 199, 214, 223, 231, 239, 241 agency 2, 113, 115, 116, 123, 134, 135, 140, 156, 159, 183, 203, 224, 236, 246 attitude to personnel 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 176, 193, 204, 214–5, 248 central Asia, from 206 disabled 115 elderly/pensioners 9, 80, 84, 86, 115, 175, 200, 209, 212 health status of 121, 151 Moscow, from 142, 205 newcomers 132, 154, 205 non-convoy 77, 84, 233 North, from the 59, 144–6, 146–7, 205–6 passivity of 33, 239 population 8, 9, 40, 47, 52, 55, 70, 121, 123, 221, 259, 279 political prisoners 91, 136, 207, 224 ‘regulars’ (mnogokhody) 132, 208, 209 relationships with personnel 112, 129, 213, 214, 216, 230, 257 uniforms 32, 33, 99, 103, 111, 113, 151, 153, 173, 245, 246 see also hierarchical order, selforganization, social relationships prison sociologies 197 privacy 3, 10, 98, 108, 111–16, 129, 130 psychological practice in prisons 9, 114, 151, 196, 218, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 257 amateur 227 civilian psychological services 228 emotion therapy 218 passim, 247, 249, 253, 257 emotional impact of 127 episodic nature of 128 mental health 19, 129, 224, 232, 233 one-to-one interaction 231 personal criminal characteristics 229 psychometric testing 218, 227, 228 rooms 114, 227 psychologists 226, 227, 228 punishment 1–4, 9, 20, 33, 47, 49, 59, 68, 96, 98–9, 101, 5, 121, 122, 132,

287

134, 141, 146, 199, 209, 220, 221, 222, 224 cells (Shizo, PKT) 101, 105, 111, 114, 115, 202 culture of 54–5, 247 differentiation of 257, 258 extra-judicial 49, 66 geography of 2, 15, 219, 255 humanization of 12, 16, 68, 84, 110, 182, 220, 259 modalities (forms) of 34, 48, 49, 50, 54, 75, 111, 140, 247 transportation as 150, 155, 255 women’s 4–5, 7, 9, 233, 238, 258, 259 psychiatric hospitals as punishment 50, 96, 224, 232, 234, 235 f.n. 18 psikhushki (psychiatric ward) 224 Serbskii Institute 224 punitive turn 221 Putin, Vladimir 21, 234 quarantine 16, 47, 101–2, 122, 124, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 150–3, 155–7, 183, 227, 228 rehabilitation 10, 12, 39, 68, 84, 102, 105, 106, 114, 151, 163, 186, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222 passim, 247, 251, 257, 259 Centre for Labour Adaptation 223 cognitive models 225 Corston Report 2007 12, 250 violent and dangerous acts 13, 165, 218, 260 re-education 219 re-socialisation 219 social re-adaptation 165 schools 78, 82, 83, 150, 223 social context of crime 225, 249 training 11, 12, 101, 104, 106, 107, 109, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225, 232, 250, 251, 257 release 39, 50, 78, 92, 93, 113, 124, 125, 176–7, 186, 194, 198, 236, 239, 247, 248 anxieties about 233, 241, 252 plans for after 176, 186, 223, 241 preparation for 12, 27, 75, 93, 110, 113, 117 f.n. 25, 176, 223, 226, 228, 229, 231, 246, 250–4 early (UDO) 182, 183, 205, 211, 212, 226, 228, 229, 231, 246 relatives, of prisoners 5, 7, 9, 14, 27, 30, 64, 65, 75, 110, 128, 142, 143, 153, 164, 165, 168, 169, 170, 175, 177, 181, 184, 186, 188, 202, 240, 250, 252

288

Index

family ties 9, 65, 164, 165, 175, 194, 274 faith 49, 239–41 religion 239, 241, 248 remand 2, 8, 19, 11, 31, 40, 121 passim, 155, 169, 175 mothers (with babies) on remand 129–33 remand prison (Sizo) 11, 15, 16, 28, 55–9, 74, 80, 100, 111, 114, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 passim, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151, 153, 155, 169,181, 182, 185, 186, 197, 201, 209 see also social relationships monitor (dezhurnaia) 131 Poor living conditions in 124, 127, 129 Cells in 98, 100, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 135, 137 f.n. 24, 139, 140, 257 research, prison 4, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22 passim, 77, 111, 112, 121, 123, 127, 129, 140, 147, 149, 152, 153, 155, 163, 164, 165, 190, 197, 198, 201, 212, 213, 219, 220, 221, 224, 226, 227, 229, 232, 233, 237, 249, 250, 253, 258 access and permissions 21 anonymity 25, 32, 41 appreciative enquiry 23 collaboration, problems of viii, 21–5, 29 ethics 25 interviews vii, 14, 21 passim, 54, 65, 89, 125, 130, 136, 149, 168, 182, 189, 193, 200, 202, 214, 218, 229, 242, 250 power relations 3, 150, 151, 212 positionality 28, 275 post-positivist 26 pre-selection 41 sexual politics of 29 socio-political context 22, 23 triangulation 24, 25, 26 35, 41 transcription 28, 33 re-settlement 256 resistance survival behaviours 180 Riazan’ viii, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 37, 38, 41, 61, 143, 144, 163, 169 Rock, P. 198 Rusche, Georg 150 Russian geography, knowledge of 145 Russian Orthodox Church 72, 114, 237, 239–47, 249 see also religion churches, prison 101, 113, 114, 124, 200, 239, 240, 242, 254 devotional spaces 239, 240 human sinfulness 240 spiritual enlightenment 238 Sakha 51 Sakharov, A. 50

Samara 145, 169 Saratov 144, 169 Scott, David 233 self-organization 98, 106–11, 210, 211, 222, 223, 227, 231, 242, 257 settlements of urban type 40 sexual relationships 33, 114, 165, 201–4, 207 see also lesbianism mutuals (vzaimiki) 203 pairs (pary) 186, 203 real guys (patsani) 204, 245 Siberia 5, 15, 48, 51, 57, 59, 61, 62, 70, 137 f.n. 6, 146, 205 Sibley, David 111 Siniavskii, Andrei 68 Sizo: see remand prison social control process 153 disciplinarity 155 social groups 26, 29, 31, 34, 36, 40, 49, 63, 65, 91, 106, 110, 112, 125–6, 146, 150, 167, 168, 199, 200–1, 205–7, 209, 221, 231, 241, 257–8 associative 205 couples and ‘half-and-halves’ 203–5 ‘families’ 29, 199–201 ‘loaf sharers’ 199–201 small social groups 199, 200, 205 social relationships 14, 15, 16, 27, 64, 112, 114, 164, 165, 175, 177, 180, 195, 197 passim, 216, 225, 244 see also hierarchical order, sexual relationships, social groups friendships 29, 99, 112, 114, 135, 149, 197, 200–1 in the gulag 59, 99 interpersonal 37, 197, 200 in the Sizo 133–5 during transportation 149, 151 trusting 16, 39, 99, 161, 197, 199, 200, 213 passim society of prisoners 198 Solikamsk 59 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander 3, 65, 66, 74, 77, 78, f.n. 9 song 10, 116, 244, 248, 249, 254 f.n. 16 Sosnovka 81, 82, 89 Soviet Union 4, 5, 10, 12, 47, 82, 97, 150, 165, 238 Soviet era 20, 21, 25, 47 Space(s) 2, 14, 15, 33, 36, 51, 64, 122, 130, 136, 146, 147 passim, 156, 181, 201, 250, 256, 257, 258 of exception 96 feminine 112

Index liminal 136, 143, 159, 250, 252 living 10, 11, 36, 130, 182, 188 male 10 militarized 10, 198, 225 private 100, 111 passim see also privacy public 48, 100, 105, 113 spatial organization, colony level 14, 15, 16, 64, 65, 79, 96 passim, 156, 181, 201, 250, 256, 257, 258 spatial exclusion 24, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 63, 68, 141, 226, 259 spatial scales 15, 69, 78, 96, 198 spatial and temporal regulation 3, 15, 49, 50, 69, 78, 96, 100–5, 110, 133, 183, 198, 246, 259 virtual 112, 11 Stalin/Stalinist 2, 3, 4, 5, 49, 50, 51, 54, 59, 65, 70, 73, 78, 91, 96, 97, 121, 182, 190, 206, 219 repression 2, 5, 65, 70 Surveillance 3, 96, 97, 98, 101, 103, 139, 141, 146, 151, 257 Stolypin carriage 100, 133, 135, 145, 148, 149 St Petersburg 51, 67, 169 Sykes, Gresham 146, 228 Syzran 142 Sverdlovsk 61, 92, 145 Taylor, Stephanie 34 telephone calls home 106, 117 f.n. 22, 131, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 174, 175, 178 f.ns 16 & 17, 179 f.n. 25, 189, 190, 191, 192, 209, 231, 259 transportation 1–3, 8, 14–16, 31, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 59, 61, 66, 69, 100, 121–4, 133, 139, 140, 141 passim 149, 151, 155–7, 183, 252, 256, 259, 267 average distances 65, 250 damaging effects of 220 duration 143, 168, 173 escorted transportation (convoy) 139, 140, 141, 142, 155, 156, 233 estafeta (relay-race) 140 travelling companions 2 waiting-room analogy 155 Tsurkova, Irina 67, 68, 155 Tuan, Yi Fu 159 Tula 57, 144 Tver 144, 245 Tyva 57 Udarnyi 82 Ufa 169 Ufsin 11, 55, 87

289

Ufsin-Mordoviia 73, 74, 80, 83, 86, 87, 92, 230, 239, 245 Ukhta 59, 144, 146 Umet 40, 82, 87, 88, 90 Urals, the 51, 61, 67, 70 United States of America (USA) 9, 49, 55, 89, 113, 121, 139, 156, 157, 173, 220, 221 Ust’-Tsipel’ 67 values, moral and traditional 7, 20, 197, 208, 221, 253 value for money 221 villages 81, 82, 84–90, 112, 113, 255 f.n. 30 violence 2, 4, 6, 11, 14, 33, 50, 111, 11, 114, 123, 124, 130, 159, 165, 208, 209, 213 bullying 33, 108, 123, 125, 132, 159, 190, 210 self-harm 112, 164, 180, 224 Vishera, R. 67 visitation 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 37, 124, 153, 164, 166–7, 168–72, 170, 189, 194, 259 visits 22, 64, 87, 111, 128, 142, 166–73, 175, 188, 180, 190, 193, 265, 266 faulty intercom system 172 long (and conjugal) 166, 170–2, 201, 259 short 166, 172 visiting rooms (suites) 65, 124, 172–3, 181, 190 Volga republics and federal region 51, 59 Vologda 143, 144, 145 Voronezh 144, 149 welfare needs 10, 20 West, the 6, 123, 163, 187–8, 189, 196 f.n. 26, 198, 217, 220, 238, 239, 243 Western jurisdictions: community Social Work Service 225 European countries 221 European Standards 3, 7, 130, 224 International law 128, 224 legislation 221 National Probation Service 225 norms 10, 11, 128, 136, 224, 226, 233, 237 offender assessments 225 policy goals 221 prison rules 136, 224 risk assessments 150, 255 sentence-planning 225 services accreditation 225 women: see also gender and gendered offending behaviours 4, 6, 8, 9, 218, 225–6, 233, 253

290 women: (cont.) criminogenic needs 9, 16, 218, 221, 225, 226, 253, 257 emotional well-being 115, 127 innate propensities 238 special needs 12, 166 vulnerability 123, 200 work: see labour and prison industries Yavas 26, 29, 37, 39, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81, 82 Young, Nathan 64–5

Index Yesenin, Sergeii 163 Zborovskaia, Anna 67 zemliachestvo 205 zeks (prisoners) 133 zone (zona) 10, 22, 25, 39, 64, 65, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 101, 102, 103, 104, 112, 114, 147, 152, 170, 171, 172, 183, 190, 204, 207, 208, 213, 233, 245, 255 Zubova Poliana 38, 40, 81, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90