Fifteen years after the collapse of communism, post-Soviet Russian remains a ‘high-imprisonment society’, second only to the USA in the relative number of people held in prison (570 per 100 000 population compared with the USA's 714 per 100 000). This gives a total prison population of around 800 000 people. These people are detained in penal facilities built during the Soviet era, the majority of which are in peripheral locations. Because the peripheries have been selected as ‘sites of punishment’, Russia's distinctive ‘geography of penality’ makes the maintenance of social contacts of prisoners difficult and undermines attempts to reduce the rates of recidivism in Russia. Women are drawn into the penal complex by virtue of their relationships with the majority male prisoner population, a process which transforms them into ‘quasi-prisoners’ and reproduces gender stereotypes.
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