Abstract
In this article, we discuss the changes in formal and informal power hierarchies, and their impact on traditional prisoner statuses, in Russian prisons. Changes have taken place against the backdrop of the attempt by the Russian Federal Prison Service to re-balance power in its favour after the 1990s, which saw a shift in the power geometry in correctional colonies (ispravitelnie kolonii) towards prison sub-cultures. This attempt has been accompanied by a heightened level of violence in the management of prisoners, which has generated an atmosphere of uncertainty, human helplessness and unpredictability in correctional colonies. One result has been the emergence of new intermediate statuses as prisoners seek to avoid the binary power structure of the traditional ‘thieves-in-law’ sub-culture and prison authorities and their proxy ‘activists’. The new intermediate statuses and groups typically are unstable but they can be seen as a threat by prison authorities, which respond by intensifying the cycle of discrimination and violence, which we illustrate using the case study of Muslim prisoners.
Introduction
The idea has occurred to me that if one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and senseless character (bezmyslitsy). Though the hard labour now enforced is uninteresting and wearisome for the prisoner, as work in itself it is reasonable … But if he had to pour water from one vessel into another and back, over and over again, to pound sand, to move a heap of earth from one place to another and back again, I believe the convict would hang himself in a few days or would commit a thousand crimes, preferring rather to die than endure such humiliation, shame and torment (unizhenya, styda i muki). Of course, such a punishment would become a torture, a form of vengeance, and would be senseless (bezsmyslenno), as it would achieve no reasonable purpose. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1862: 25) 1
A first version of this article was completed before the circulation in the Russian and foreign-language media in 2021 of reports of a cache of officially recorded videos from the archives of the Russian prison service. 2 For the authors, it was impossible to remain neutral given the scale of violence perpetrated against people caught in the millstones of the prison machine shown in these videos. Then on 24 February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine with its reports of revenge-fuelled cruelty merely added to the difficult questions about the origin of systemic violence and disregard for human in rights in Russia. We felt compelled to revisit our analysis of the materials we had collected for the project on which we have been working since 2019. Reviewing the corpus of interviews with former prisoners we had collected over a 2-year period, we could no longer overlook the stories of humiliating treatments and punishments that had surfaced in the narratives of our research participants. We felt compelled to find a fresh focus for the analysis of the project's materials. Despite the inclination of team members to take a stance, we agreed it was important to avoid political and human rights language and to remain as far as possible removed from the tense discussions circulating about prison violence at the time in the Russian media. We spent a long time debating how to label the violence we were told about because academic analyses of such practices in the western literature with which we were familiar seemed to confuse rather than clarify its purpose. The treatment of the research participants in our study resonated with Dostoevsky's verdict on the punishments prisoners suffered in the Siberian prison in which he was confined in the mid-19th century, as ‘senseless’. For Dostoevsky and his contemporaries, the word described ‘the property of meaninglessness’ and ‘stupidity’ when applied to ‘man and beast and, words and deeds’ (Dal’, 1978: 74). Our research participants described the feelings of humiliation, shame and torment they suffered as consequence of the physical ill-treatment to which they were subjected and which, like pouring water from one vessel to another and back, appeared to them not to be aimed at the achievement of ‘some reasonable purpose’. The forms the torments take today are not explicable by reference to a set of formal regulations or legal norms governing the use of force in the penal context, and their application is often random in time and space and in respect of whom they target.
The background to our investigation is the recurrent attempt in the past two decades by the Federal Service for the Administration of Punishments, hereafter FSIN (Federal'naya sluzhba po ispolneniyu nakazanii) to end the power of the traditional sub-culture in prisons, the so-called, thieves-in-law (vory-v-zakoni). The thieves-in-law emerged as a society for ruling the criminal underworld in the gulag (1930–1960) and it remained the dominant prison sub-culture throughout the Soviet period (Karklins, 1989; Varese 1998; 2001; Vincent, 2020). With a reputation for using violence to enforce its vision of prison society and the rule of thieves’ code (the ‘understanding’ or ponyatie), the thieves-in-law capitalised on the hollowing out of penal power in the decade immediately after the Soviet Union's collapse. The period of chaos or bespredel, as the 1990s are remembered, saw high levels of inter-prisoner violence as new gangs challenged the traditional sub-culture (Antonian and Kolyshshnitsyna, 2009). However, by linking up with organised crime groups beyond the prison walls, the thieves-in-law prevailed and (re)consolidated their power in a majority of penal facilities in the country, although they are no longer everywhere the monopoly sub-culture (Mironova, 2023; Slade, 2013, 2016; Touraine and Oleinik, 2017; Varese et al., 2021).
The clawing back of power by prison administrations from the criminal sub-culture is described colloquially as the ‘re-colouring’ (perekrashenie) of penal facilities from ‘black’ to ‘red’, where ‘black’ is the label attached to a facility in which the sub-culture is in control of the everyday life of prisoners, and ‘red’ where regime rules are fully enforced by the prison administration. These attempts at re-colouring have had a profound effect on the social order in Russian correctional facilities, whereby the ‘thieves’ code coexists today with new, informal rules reflecting compromises made with the prison regime. The compromises have taken place against the backdrop of an aggressive co-option of prisoners, referred to as ‘activists’ (aktivisti), to the task of re-colouring (Runova, 2023). According to the research participants, the number of these activist prisoners has increased sharply in recent years, and they can now make up to half of all prisoners in a facility. The task of recruiting prisoner-activists has fallen primarily to operational officers (operativniki) from the Operational and Regime Department (oперативно-режимный отдел), hereafter ORD, that exists in every facility. The ORD is a legacy from the gulag and its role is to act as an internal secret service in prisons. It is charged with uncovering past and future crimes, assessing ideological beliefs and loyalties and acting on the findings, monitoring staff, and recruiting activists and informants. To recruit activist-prisoners to the task of re-colouring, the ORD uses a combination of coercion and incentives such as the promise of early release or some material benefit (Pallot, 2024; 242–243). Operational officers and their proxy prisoner-activists are frequently implicated in reported incidents that circulate on the ill-treatment of prisoners.
Below, we describe the escalating repertoire of forms of coercion that degrade and suppress human dignity and subjectivity of prisoners as reported to us by the people we interviewed. From the side of the administration, it consists of raids on ‘black dormitories’, mass beatings, fines and purges involving the removal of sub-cultural leaders to punishment dormitories or to one of the ‘torture conveyors’ in Russia's penal heartland. 3 These augment ritualised humiliations that have become part of the everyday disciplinary practices in penal facilities. Our hypothesis is that the heightened violence in Russian colonies has been associated with the emergence of intermediate statuses in prisoner society positioned between the traditional sub-culture and prison administrations and their proxies.
Because of the explicit descriptions of violence we advise reader discretion for the fourth section of this article.
The research field
The empirical basis of the article is 60 in-depth biographical interviews conducted during 2019–2020 with former prisoners in two oblasts in the interior heartland of Russia's penal estate (Pallot, 2005). Independent research inside prisons has effectively been prohibited in the past two decades, hence our decision to recruit former prisoners for the research. Unlike much prison research in western jurisdications, we are not presenting a picture of prisoners’ experiences in a particular facility or territory of a regional authority. Our research participants had served sentences in a broad range of facilities from across the Russian Federation, and while we are not seeking to generalise from their narratives, based on conversations with civil society organisations and media reports we are confident that the violence they describe is part of a systemic problem in Russia.
Our initial research aim was to understand the transformation of individual prisoners’ ethnic and racial identity construction on the journey from arrest through to eventual release, and our prompt questions were formulated accordingly. However, as we have already observed, we were taken aback by the frequency that descriptions of violence, apparently organised or sanctioned by prison staff, surfaced in the interviews and of the depth of pain this caused our research participants, regardless of their prior identities. In recruiting research participants, we drew both on the assistance of gatekeepers to networks of former prisoners and local expert investigators. We aimed for the inclusion of both adult men and women and members of different ethnic and religious groups who had served sentences for criminal offences in various categories of FSIN facilities.
The field proved to be extremely difficult, both for researchers and research participants. A number of unexpected difficulties and risks arose during the field work that had to be solved in situ. Among the challenges was finding a suitable place for an interview that did not compromise the confidentiality or security of either investigators or research participants. This challenge, which is intrinsic to interviewing vulnerable subjects, was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic because of local differences in regulations on travel and access to public spaces. The atmosphere in some interviews proved to be emotionally intense. Many research participants had left prison with chronic diseases that enhanced their physical vulnerability, so extra care had to be taken to maintain an appropriate physical distance between researcher and research participant (Omel’chenko, 2020: 83–97).
Interviews typically lasted between 1 and 2 h. All were recorded, transcribed and anonymised according to protocols agreed with the ERC Ethics Committee soon after return from the field. In quoting from the research participants’ talk, we have given the age and declared gender of the participant at the time of interview, but under the requirements of the GDPR 2016 and Russian Federation data protection legislation (Federal Law No. 152-FZ on Personal Data 2006: https://pd.rkn.gov.ru/authority/p146/p164/) we can give no further personal details.
Everyday forms of degradation in Russian correctional colonies
“To sit in silence, to run, to bark and to recite out loud all the internal regime rules …” (Male, age 27) It's like torture – we go out, the whole barrack has to go out. We take the bunk frames, mattresses, bedside tables – we had to take everything; that is, we’d leave a completely bare room behind. It's such idiocy … they begin to kick you and beat you with their batons and you go in whatever you’ve got on when it was thirty degrees centigrade outside. They just want to kick you out. I mean, you need to evacuate, again and again, with a mattress, with a bedside table, with a bed. That is, you didn't have time to put something on, never time to dress … It's just to show off the regime rules”. (Male, age 39)
The research participants’ view was that this was done either as punishment for some violation or just ‘for the fun of it’, and it was understood by them as integral to abuse administered collectively to reinforce the formal regime rules. The prisoners described the exhaustion in body and mind they experienced from these practices: The activists were everywhere in the colony. They would stand at their post, observing everything that you were doing in a way that was nauseating for a normal person. You must stand in line and if you turn your head and look sideways and they see you do it, they will mark it down. That would earn you a half-day punishment. That's half a day when you would have to clear up outside, but they would shorten your manacles, so you were permanently bent over crippling your back in extreme pain. (Male, age 38)
Forcing all prisoners to engage in collective acts adds to the pains associated with disciplinary practices necessary for security in the carceral environment. Searching for a motive, the research participants could only see in them the intention to humiliate and degrade. Daily ‘household’ or domestic tasks they were required to complete were ‘almost always under the close control of other convicts, the reds and goats [in prison argot kozli meaning collaborators], whose main task was to oppress [gnobit’ lit. to spread rot to] everyone’ (male, age 40). For another, the occasions when ‘they would kick us all out of the detachment dormitory in the middle of the night, line us up [to clear snow]…’ was, ‘punishment, of course. Well, sometimes they did it just for fun’ (female, age 43).
Such collective actions also put the individual prisoner at the mercy of the whole ‘collective’ because of the operation of the principle of ‘joint responsibility’ (krugovaya poruka). In the following extract, the research participant describes a typical collective penalty for a violation by a single group member: The order would be for 500 to 1000 squats. Well, you were all stood there in a circle, arms round each other and, there was a gypsy who did not know how to squat. But here I am next to him and I have to squat myself, but he is a drag on me as I stand up and I need to lift him – and [at every squat] we have to shout: “permission please!”. (Male, age 37)
This ‘exercise’ is called the ‘brotherhood’ in prison argot, which has a name for all the various forms of torment to which prisoners in Russia can be subjected (Pshshenychnyi, 2018). It is an example of the cruelty research participants told us was part of the daily routines passed by personnel to self-organisation committees to supervise. Self-organisation committees have existed since the 1960s and today are tasked with supervising cleaning the dormitories, communal spaces and washrooms, organising entertainments, mentoring, conservation and cultural education (Hardy, 2016; Omel’chenko, 2012; Pallot and Piacentini, 2012). According to the last official census of prisoners taken at the turn of the century, the share of prisoners serving on such committes at that time was 21.8% in men's colonies and 33.3% in women's (Kazakova, 2011: 72).
4
Activist prisoners dominate these committees and have acquired extraordinary de facto disciplinary powers over other prisoners. ‘Sanitary sub-committees’ are notorious for going well beyond what is practically necessary to clean and clear the barrack and open spaces:
The ‘Internal Regime Rules’ (pravila vnutrennogo rasporyadka) are legally prescribed regulations customised for each category of facility. For correctional colonies, there are 199 rules. The most important, which prisoners should memorise, is the list of their obligations and prohibitions governing the conduct of everyday life. While the rules are supposed to offer protection against arbitrary power, they are framed in a way – either too vague (e.g. the obligation to take part in morning exercises) or too precise (name badges have to be attached exactly in line with the second button of a prisoners’ uniform) – that allows manipulation on the part of personnel and activists responsible for enforcement. Morning exercises timetabled at 5 or 6 a.m. in ‘red’ colonies are the occasion for abuse of prisoners who, for various reasons, cannot perform the required actions. The morning exercise is after reveille. You must perform ‘pumping’. Pumping is squating and standing … can you imagine? Anybody who falls over, then has to repeat it carrying a fire extinguisher or sledgehammer. And the guard hits anyone who falls – yes, and those who can’t do it are beaten with the shovel as they lie on the ground. (Male, age 27) It's all ‘at the double’ and ‘ninety degrees’ (devyanosto) – like, you must hold your hands behind your back and run. Well, and, you know what, bending over. It's like this [demonstrates] … you run but you are still beaten with their truncheons to make you bend lower and lower. That was in the red camp, very tough – and you had to keep your legs straight. So you are 90 degrees bent over … And you run like this, but they still beat you so that you go lower, lower but you don't see who's hitting or where you're running … all you see, is the feet of the person running in front of you…” (Male, age 27)
We have repeatedly asked ourselves the question of what is the purpose of such practices; are they, as suggested by the research participants, punishment for violation of some absurd rule, all about power, or ‘just because’, or do they have an underlying rationality that we have failed to see? Alternatively, should these practices be understood as integral to the modern Russian prison system, that aims to break the will and spirit of its victims through regular, routinised violence? Some of the practices described make reaching any other than the last of these explanations difficult. This was certainly the explantion we were given for ‘stomping’, a collective action that resembles a dance, where the prisoners must stamp their feet in unison for prolonged periods to a fast beat or music. One respondent, unconscious of the Foucauldian resonance, observed that the practice is not unique to the prison environment: ‘[T]hey teach stomping … in the army and to young children. And they did it in the camps’ (male, age 40). Other examples are fictitious floor cleaning. Our respondents experienced this demonstration of their complete powerlessness as particularly humiliating: You have to pretend that you have a floor cloth and one after the other you bend over your pretend rag, like this [demonstrates] … one after another and in this position you have to keep going, but for how long before you cannot go on? After 4 hours, my legs would begin to fail, then my back. You fall, you get up, they hit you … and you must go on…” (Male, age 39)
Sexualised violence as the ultimate senseless punishment
The effect of sexualised violence is always the same; its victims are deprived of their dignity, their voice, individuality, humanity, and self- and group-identities. For male prisoners, the process is frequently associated with gender-based humiliation involving coercive action with a sexualised content, such as rape. The result is that the degrading treatment of male prisoners is overwritten by the circulation in the captive community of doubts about the victim's masculinity, which deviates from the rigid patterns of normativity that prevail in Russian society. In the penal context, this represents an additional layer of punishment to the deprivation of freedom. Women suffer similar over-writing of the ‘normal’ pains of imprisonment but it assumes different forms (Omelchen’ko, 2012; Pallot and Piacentini, 2012). Talking about sexualised violence was a particularly difficult topic for research participants and when they did open up, it was often in the third person. Consequently, we did not know whether we were hearing hearsay, witness evidence or personal experiences: They dragged them in … they would take the underpants off one of them and tell the other to f**k him. The deputy director of the operational and regime department is sitting there and right in front of him they do that; right in front of him. They bend [the prisoner] over, seize his hands and strip him and then say to the other prisoner: “Come on, if you don’t want this to happen to you, f**ck him.” That's the sort of thing that happened. (Male, age 38) … and [there are colonies] with these harems, where you would fear for your arse. [In] them one of the favorite methods of the pederasts is to make the prisoner take off his underpants … and they would even push a shank up his arse. That happened to Vanya … his internal organs were torn, he was away for a long time because they had to take him to the civilian hospital … (Male, age 38)
The research participants identified selected penal regions notorious for bullying with a sexual context. These corresponded to the ‘torture conveyors’ identified by human rights NGOs in Russia's interior. The threat and symbolic nature of sexualised humiliations served as a reminder that physical and psychological trauma aside, all prisoners are vulnerable to being re-asigned by sub-culture bosses to the lowest, outcast (opushchenii) or shamed (obizhenii) caste in the prisoner social hierarchy. Sexualised punishment, or the threat of it, provides the perpetrators with a powerful tool to blackmail victims, as well as acting as a general deterrent to rule violation. Describing sexualised tortures with names such as, ‘wet willy technique’ and ‘wet panties’, which we will not reproduce here, one respondent described how they were used by ORD officers to divert prisoners from aligning with the thieves-in-law: There was very severe torture there. There is a sharpened electrode which they use to pierce and burn the genitals. They tortured me like that … It's so that you either agree cooperate, or so you don’t become a thief there … (Male, age 27)
The transformation of the social order
The performative violence described in our interviews sets norms of behaviour in the relationship between prisoners and personnel. For Croatian criminologist, Kreshimir Petković (2017), it represents a regression to sovereign punishment, albeit taking place behind prison walls rather than in the public square, in some of the former communist countries. We found that it has had a transformative and destabilising effect on prison society, producing changes in the character and ordering of statuses inherited from Soviet times.
The social order among prisoners has always consisted of clearly demarcated boundaries between the different castes (Slade, 2013; Touraine and Oleinik, 2017; Varese, 1998; Vavokhine, 2004). In the late Soviet period and spilling over into the 1990s, prisoner society was dominated by a pyramidal structure, with the ‘authoritative prisoners’ (blatnye) at the top, descending through various specialised ranks to the ‘ordinary men’ (muzhiki) making up the majority, to the outcasts (opushchennie) and shamed (obizhenii) – at the bottom of the scale. Paralleling this was a formal hierarchy consisting of prisoners appointed by the administration to various privileged positions that were given legal form in prison reforms from the 1960s. Thus, in correctional labour colonies, prisoner prefects (zavkhoz, dneval’nyi) chosen by the administration to organise and supervise the quotidian life of the community or detachment (otryad) of prisoners in the barrack dormitories, and to liase with the administration. At certain times, these prefects were able to punish fellow prisoners and, with the administration turning a blind eye, at certain times this power was formalised; for example, during the war certain prisoners were given guard duties with the right to carry fire arms, and in 2005, to assist the re-colouring campaign, the Ministry of Justice formally set up Sections of Discipline and Order (SDOs) made up of activists in all colonies that were given formal disciplinary powers. 6
In the past 20 years, determining one's status or ‘who are you in life’ (kto ty po zhizni) has become more difficult for prisoners in Russia. According to our interview partners, terms like ‘black’ and ‘red’ to describe prisoners who either oppose or collaborate with the administration have lost some of their relevance. The relaxation of aspects of the prisoners’ code and of what counts for collaboration with the administration have created ambiguity and uncertainty, but have also have opened new spaces for the emergence of ‘intermediate statuses’ prisoners can adopt. Since the atmosphere of change is supported by the aggressive legitimation of the right to violence, embracing an intermediate status can be understood as a search by prisoners for new, relatively safe, niches. In other words, it is a means of survival in the violent milieu of Russian correctional colonies. During the interviews, we came across a variety of different names used to identify these new positions and statuses.
Prisoners who live outside the thieves’ ‘understanding’ without becoming ‘red’, are individuals who, while agreeing to work in the penal industries may refuse to participate in the administration's violent practices or to join a self-organisation committee. In the past, prisoners could not simply sit out a sentence ‘keeping their heads down’, but now the possibilty exists in some places for them to disengage from the informal and formal hierarchies. However, the intermediate positions they adopt turn out to be indeterminate and difficult to sustain and require special skills, resourcefulness, quick decision-making, and material and financial support. As one respondent explains, [T]o serve your sentence [as an ‘intermediate’] – you have to be ‘on the move’ [na dvizhukhe]. I was constantly doing something; I couldn’t be lazy there. I did it by being constantly on the lookout, talking to people, being around all the time, that's how it turned out for me…” (Male, age 44) [T]his is someone who can’t decide who he wants to be. And it turns out that he finds a way of living that is easiest for him. Let's say he agrees to be an activist, everything is easy for him, and he gets what he wants. All he must do is tell the hacks what, where, and when, and he gets a reward. Then there are those who want to work, and we say they have chosen the ‘grey life’ (zhit’ po seren’komu) [ …] these guys will come out and support you if you need them for some reason; like if you want to organize a riot in the camp. They are the grey mass … (Male, age 40)
Not all prisoners can sustain an intermediate status. They are pressurised by operational officers and activists using threats and humiliations, which create a general atmosphere of hopelessness, uncertainty, and despair among those who would prefer to remain non-aligned. Any sign of weakness is exploited by both sides. As described by one participant, the ‘intermediates’ can find themselves on the receiving end of violence:
The onslaught of bullying can create a communicative and social vacuum around a prisoner, conferring on them a questionable status. Such people are described as being ‘under question’ (pod voprosom), and can remain such for a prolonged period. One respondent told us about a prisoner whose status was ‘under question’ in his colony who ‘for ten years, ate and drank alone’ (so svoei tarelochkoi, kruzhkoi khodil). These prisoners are in a precarious position because they are unable to rely on the normal adaptive strategies, such as joining other prisoners in a small group, a family (semeika), for material sharing and moral support. The exchange below is with a former prisoner who was a sub-culture leader:
Such prisoners, infact, constitute a risk-group for expulsion to the outcasts. These have always been Russia's penal ‘other’ (Omel’chenko, 2016). The traditional route for inclusion in this social category is a conviction for a ‘bad’ article – child molestation, or murder, rape, paederasty. Now, however, it can also result from incidents and behaviours that are perceived as violating the thieves’ morality norms. The decision to cast out lies with the power holders in a barrack, cell or colony. This, also from a sub-culture member: [W]hen I was a watcher (smotryashchii), we punished one guy just because he had stolen a loaf bread from a young girl … First, we beat him up; then, well, as they say, we cast him out. Then, when I was in a strict regime prison, this man arrives and we were preparing tea and were sitting drinking it, and this new arrival says that he was in for raping and killing his mother and that's it … he is cast out. (Male, age 40)
We learned from our interviews how broad is the range of the ‘violations’ that constitute grounds for casting out. They can be roughly classified as resulting from an individual disobeying the prisoner code (po bespredele), ignorance of the norms of behaviour (po neznake) and youth (po maloletke). In the following extract, the forbidden practice the prisoner admitted to was oral sex: One [prisoner] told someone that he did it with his wife or some other girl … And the other prisoners found out about it, and they called him in to find out if he had done it. He admitted it. They beat him around the head with an iron mug and kicked him in the arse, and then banished him to the outcasts’ cell. (Male, age 37)
Prisoners who already are subject to victimisation, ‘intermediates’ refuse to align with either thieves or activists are all vulnerable to being labelled as outcasts. We found that some prisoners consciously choose outcast status as a strategy to avoid pressure from prisoners and personnel. Making this choice means the individual agrees to perform all the most humiliating tasks in prison, and may have to join ‘the harem’, a segregated space ‘reserved’ for outcasts who may be sexually exploited by high caste members.
The names given for prisoners with intermediate statuses varies between facilities and regions, but the very fact of their appearance suggests that the world of the Russia's captive population is changing. The prisoner society we describe above is the by-product of a heightened violent period of the USSR's collapse.
Statuses and positions of ethnic others
Our research confirms that ethno-religious identity has become a salient feature in Russian prisons promoting new kinds of ethnically and religiously based solidarity networks. Historically, certain national, ethnic and religious groups have been targetted for execution, deportations and imprisonment. Since 1991, the criminal justice system has been used to target North Caucasan ethnic groups during two Chechen wars (1994–1996; 1991–2009) and the same applies to Crimean Tartars since 2014 in annexed Crimea, and to migrant labourers from the former Central Asian republics on grounds of their vulnerability to recruitment to radical, violent forms of Islam (Curro et al., 2022; Eraliev and Urinboyev, 2020). Unfortunately, the return of FSIN to extreme secrecy means we have to rely on anecdotal accounts of an expansion of Muslims incarcerated in Russia in the past two decades as Muslims have been singled out as the principal ethno-religious group for persecution as moral panic about prison as a site of violent Islamic radicalisation has grown (Urinboyev, 2020; Urinboyev and Pallot, 2023). The research particpants decribed the formation of horizontal social groups in prisons. These included jamaats, each with its own amir elected at a meeting reproducing the traditional Muslim gathering and which provide spiritual, social and material support to all Muslim prisoners, but especially to those who have no support-links on the outside: … [E]ach detachment has its own amir… The amir is the Muslim elder, it's not something that [ordinary gangs] have … He is the imam who stands at front and recites prayers … he is the most knowledgeable person – for example, he may know Arabic but even if he doesn’t understand Arabic, he knows how to read it and we have to kind of listen to him. He might be just eighteen but that makes no difference because he might have been practising religion from the age of five or and he can be forty years old and like … if other convicts have any problems, he is the one to go to solve them. Yes, if, for example, there is an instance when a Muslim prisoner is put on report for a regime violation which he thinks is unfair, well, the amir would go and try to discuss it with the staff and explain that the prisoner didn’t in fact do what they said he had done…” (Male, age 21).
For the prison authoritites the existence of Muslim jamaats is potentially threatening. Visible signs of religious observance, such as a long beard, the consumption of halal food, and regular prayers, are viewed with suspicion. In this respect, the situation in Russia is similar to attitudes in Western jurisdictions (Awan, 2013; Hamm, 2009; Marranci, 2009; Williams, 2018). FSIN's experts, often quoting western authorities, assume a linear progression in prisons between praying within a jamaat to extremism (Curro et al., 2022). This view can be shared by sub-cultures. In his interviews with thieves-in-law in Siberia in the 2010s, Ivan Peshkov (2015: 75) found that it was in the thieves’ interests to supress alternative power nodes in prison, such as those based on ethnicity or common geographical origin (zemlyachestvo).
Discriminatory language surfaced in many interviews with majority Russian prisoners, who referred to Muslims as ‘blacks’ (chernye) and ‘slaves’ (raby). This runs through one respondent's talk about the work ethic among transnational prisoners from Central Asia: They can be alright and are commendable, but you must keep an eye on them, really keep a strict eye on them. They can need punishing physically … they can be crooked, not doing what they have been told to do and pretending that they don’t understand you. But they are cunning, and all think as one when they are in a pack together. (Male, age 45) They become Islam in prison, basically you know what? You have this prison sub-culture right, right … but [they] don’t want to join it and they don’t want to be red, yeah. And putting it simply … they want to be separate – that's how they think of themselves, yes: “I’m Islamic, I’m a Muslim. I don’t need you for anything.” It's like they’re part of the mass of prisoners who are with the activists but somehow separate from them. They have something else. It's just that it's better for them, that way. (Male, age 34)
Judging from our study, black colonies, can be more tolerant of Islam than red: ‘in the black zones it is easier and simpler to be a Muslim’ (male, age 50). This greater tolerance is reflected in the willingness of sub-culture leaders to make space for religious practices that might contradict the thieves’ code. In this case, Muslims are integrated into the social order as a single group on the grounds that they constitute ‘their own community’. We know also from the research partcipant we quote above that the amir can negotiate for clemancy on behalf of members of the jamaat with the penal authorities. Interviews with Muslim former prisoners from Uzbekistan, also confirm that rights to Islamic practices can be negotiated with the camp administrations, in one case through the intervention of a Chechen authority figure in the thieves sub-culture (Urinboyev and Pallot, 2023). Examples like these, speak to the possibility of the spaces emerging in Russian correctional facilities analogous to those in other jurisdictions where communal living facilitates the formation of more horizontal social groups among prisoners and the development of constructive relationships with staff (Skarbek, 2010; Beijersbergen et al., 2016; Butler et al., 2018; Darke, 2018; O'Donnell, 2023). To date they have not. Meanwhile, in other former communist countries, the replacement of communal by cellular accommodation has been chosen route for eradicating the thieves-in-law (Piacenteni and Slade, 2015; Pallot and Zeveleva, 2022; Symkovych, 2018a).
Group formation among Muslims is taking shape in Russian correctional institutions, irrespective of their ethnic or national origin. A main cleavage is opening, therefore, on religious and ‘civilizational’ grounds between Muslims and non-Muslims. This is new in Russian penal institutions. For Muslim prisoners, adoption of Islam, represents a symbolic escape from the traditional prison hierarchy and from being recruited by the administration, but our study showed that their stability depends, crucially, upon the size of the Muslim populations and their ethnic or national content.
Conclusion
Violence and suffering are sewn into the very fabric of any prison system around which formal and informal regimes of power, order and hierarchies are built. People deprived of their liberty are among the most invisible in modern society and their experience of violence, hidden. This is because both of the inherent secrecy of prison systems and the reluctance of victims to share their experiences of violence. Violence has been addressed against the backdrop of a preoccupation with the humanisation of punishment, welfare reform and a commitment to finding ways to reduce extreme forms of humiliation of human dignity and personality. Approached through the lens of the ‘pains of imprisonment’ as orginally conceptualised by Gresham Sykes, western penology's approach is that physical and psychological violence can have no place in the management of prisoners. Nevertheless, extra-legal measures are used against people held in detention in jurisdictions across the world, including among the signatories of UNCAT and the ECHR, even as discussion continues about expanding the list of imprisonment's pains (Crewe, 2011; Crewe et al., 2017; Haggerty and Bucerius, 2020, 2011).
Many studies in western penology focus on gang violence, with prison authorities implicated in the failure of their duty of care, or as perpetrators, especially in relation to women. Incidents that come to light of physical violence and ritualised humilation clearly exceeding international norms, such as in the notorious case of Abu Graib (Gundur, 2020; Butler et al., 2018; Wooldredge, 2020), are widely reported and condemned. The rapporteur for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, reporting on allegations of article three violations in member states’ places of detention for 2021–2022, drew attention to the gap between the absolute prohibition of torture and the ‘reality on the ground’, whereby state actors repeatedly fall short of their international obligations (Efstathiou, 2022: 1). Russia in 2021 was one of three member states of the the Council of Europe in which the rapporteur identified the systemic nature of physical torture, with Turkey and Azerbaijan the other two (Symkovych, 2019). Torture, inhuman and degrading treaments initiated by staff are not ‘one off’ or ‘bad apple’ events in the Russian Federation, but are integral to the management of offenders in the country's prisons. Judging from our interviews, the violent incidents associated with such practices are more frequent today than the violence orginating with the traditional gang sub-culture.
In this article we have labelled the violence recounted to us by the research participants in our study as being ‘senseless’. This places us at odds with the view that violence is usually rationally motivated. For Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry (2018: 158) writing on violence in relation to terrorism, the threshold for senselessness in violent acts is high, occurring when the perpetrators transgress society's sacred values and moral convictions. We believe that the ritualised violence described by our research participants is transgressive and, moreover, that this is inherent in the system of control over the body, mind and emotions of the prisoner in Russian penal facilities. Our view of the senslessness of the violence perpetrated against prisoners chimes with the verdict of the former prisoners we interviewed who volunteered comments on the motivations of the perpetrators. For them, the violence they experienced was perpetrated ‘just for the fun of it’, ‘to show off the regime rules’, ‘to make the system’, ‘to break the prisoner’, and was ‘an absurdity’, ‘idiocy’; ‘it's unclear when and it's unclear why’, ‘without meaning’ and ‘sadism’.
We do not maintain that the application of physical force and psychological pressure are always devoid of rationality in Russian penal institutions. Prisoners in Russia know when they are breaking internal regime rules and that they will be punished for doing so, and officers have been trained in the proportionate use of physical force when necessary. During the Russian Federation's 26 year membership of the Council of Europe, it fitted itself out with the laws, institutions and technologies necessary for the protection of prisoners’ rights and acquainted personnel with recommended behavioural norms. However, as recently argued, compliance with recommendations has been more performative, than substantive (Piacentini and Katz, 2022). Among the other post-communist states in Europe, with the exception of Belarus, and Ukraine) the Russian Federation's prison system has traversed the least distance from its Soviet communist predecessor, a consequence of which is that it has fallen short of reforms that would prioritise the needs of prisoners who wish to escape the cycle of violence (Symkovych, 2018b, 2018c; Chulitskaya and Matonayte, 2024).
The underlying problem of the penal reforms that have been introduced in Russia is that they have been grafted onto a penal system that from its foundation in the gulag has been at the service of the repressive state. The prison stands alongside other institutions characterised for their rights violations – the army, para-military organisations, the police, organised crime, the mob and recently, the conscript and mercenary units responsible for the execution and mass killings of civilians in Bucha, Izum, and others, in the war on Ukraine. The violence of Russia's prisons functions to immobilise domestic opposition to the state's revanchist aims by spreading fear of the consequences of arrest and imprisonment by incapacitating oppositonists politicians, and the leaders and members of national or ethno-religious groups perceived as constituing a threat to national security. At the same time, an analysis of the composition of the prison population communicates to domestic and international audiences who are the insiders and outsiders in the Russian world, ‘ruskii mir’.
Senseless violence, as we have understood it in this article may well achieve the re-colouring of the country's penal facilities, although the jury is still out on how successful it has been to date. We can say, however, that the attempts to reconfigure the power geometry in prisons within the context of a militarised prison service, a collectivist system managing prisoners and a harsh penal culture all tracing their orgins to the gulag, has had unintended consequences. We have focused on the way in which violence has destabilised prisoner society and opened up spaces for potential resistance to the penal order that has prevailed since the ascendancy of Vladimir Putin. To date, these new intermediate statuses have proved to be inherently unstable and have lead to isolation and vulnerablity of the individual prisoner and, when joined together in a community find themselves subject to systematic counter-measures. In the circumstances of the war against Ukraine and laws that make prisoners liable for service at the front under a general mobilisation, it would be folly to predict whether intermediate statuses will become a permanent fixture in Russian prisoner society. In the short term, the perpetuation of the cycle of violence has serious consenquences for Russian society at large. At the expiry of their sentences prisoners have not been helped to address their offending behaviours. Rather, the violence and rule breaking prisoners encounter, whether as victims or perpetrators while incarcerated, increases the stock in Russia of cruel, violent and infantilized people who have little idea about acceptable behavioural norms.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme (grant number 788488 gulagechoes).