Carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons

Abstract

This paper introduces to punishment and society scholarship a new carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons. Russian imprisonment remains elusive to prisons scholars and ethnographers around the world. Moreover, on the subject of prisoners' rights specifically, the scholarship is dominated by legal discourse. The empirical and theoretical scholarship that has developed over the last twenty years has argued that Russian imprisonment is exceptional in the study of world penal systems with the research seeking to gain a sense of this exceptionality through looking at the inertial legacies of Gulag penal culture on present day punishment forms. This article attempts to challenge this claim and will argue that specifically in the area of human rights, Russia has followed a not dissimilar carceral formation to Western prisons. Through an interrogation of the cultural, political and historical factors underpinning how rights are framed in Russian prisons the article suggests that human rights are operationalised as a lever for legal and penal control. This is a significant new finding in the study of Russian imprisonment because of the questions that arise around penal resilience, how rights and penal power develop through discourse and how global penal norms converge across jurisdictions.

Negative visibility and ‘the defences of the weak’: The interplay of a managerial culture and prisoner resistance

“…This structurally amplified rights-consciousness enabled these prisoners, combining with another structural factor of officers' common legal illiteracy, to fend off officer power and reconstitute the internal structures of the prison's power dynamics. Even so, the entrenched, repressive penal culture (Piacentini and Katz, 2017) and its translation into prison ethos and practices (Garland, 1990), together with the legacy of ordinary citizens' 'internal colonization' (Shearer, 2015: 721) by the state and its colluding branches, diminished the capability (Gangas, 2016) and readiness of many prisoners to pursue a legally sanctioned form of resistance through official grievances. Conversely, by invoking the concept of negative visibility, I have advanced the case for the interplay of a local political culture with prisoner resistance.…”

“…Although they rarely disapproved of those engaged in 'naming, blaming, and claiming' (Calavita and Jenness, 2014: 49), despite its potential threat to the status quo of peace (Symkovych, 2018), prisoners regarded these bureaucratic quests more as legitimate leisure with a tint of eccentricity than as a form of resistance. The inertial totalitarian legacy of the collusion between state branches, blended with the undeserving prisoner status (Khlevniuk, 2004;Piacentini and Katz, 2017), partially explains this scepticism. One man from central Ukraine told me about police physical abuse he experienced during his arrest there and cautioned about the signal divergence of the law-on-the-books and law-in-action: The prisoners were likely right to be sceptical: following one of the weekly grievance fora the prosecutor summoned the officers and advised them how to write disciplinary reports so that they would withstand a legal challenge (see Garland, 1990: 255 on a 'signifying practice').…”

Russia and the Soviet Union from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century

“…While this reduction in prison population by almost half is remarkable, contemporary imaginings of the former Soviet Union as a gulag society have endured. 23 The majority of exiles across our period were rank-and-file criminals from the lower classes and the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children from the peasant and labouring classes caught up in mass peasant and ethnic minority deportations. 24 Some exiles were convicted in a court for a specific offence, but many were exiled administratively, without recourse to the courts, both as individuals or as we have discussed already, as families or as part of whole social groups.…”

Battlegrounds: mobilizing humanitarian discourses in São Paulo detention centers

“…We should note that this article is part of a set of debates around the political and social uses of the language of human rights, specifically those that develop around or within the prison apparatus (Calavita and Jenness 2013;Jefferson and Gaborit 2015;Piacentini and Katz 2016;Marques 2018). Over the past decade, a number of researchers from different countries have focused on the use of humanitarian discourse in prison contexts, its heterodox aims, and its unintended effects.…”

“…In this regard, Piacentini and Katz (2016), in their research on the Russian penal system, underline the current maintenance and perpetuation of punitive measures in that country (whose roots go back to the gulags), now permeated by Russia's normative alignment with the European protocols for the guarantee of prisoner rights. Similarly, looking at Canadian prisons, Hannah-Moffat (2001) argues that the legal framework for defending human rights often masks or even strengthens the punitive power of prison institutions.…”