What is happening in the penal system?

A “round table” on this topic took place at the Kharkiv “Maidan Svobody” press centre on 2 April.

At the end of last week, a group of convicts at the Temnivska Penal Colony No. 100 near Kharkiv, as a sign of protest against disciplinary measures taken by the administration, inflicted cuts upon themselves, for which force was used against them. This incident became the occasion for holding a “round table”, to which, in addition to the co-chair of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, Yevhen Zakharov, the head of the Kharkiv Department of the State Penal Service, Oleksandr Kyzym, was also invited; however, the latter did not appear at the event.



Therefore, Yevhen Zakharov himself had to answer the questions of the moderator and the journalists. He noted that one of the main reasons for such protest actions, which are carried out by convicts, is that prisoners in Ukraine are still kept in quite difficult and poor conditions. According to him, the national penal system is in need of reform: at present, it resembles a Soviet GULAG more than the penitentiary system of a European country.

Poor state funding also leads to this. During the most difficult years, from 1999 to 2000, approximately 30 kopecks per day were allocated for the food of one prisoner, and only 4 kopecks for medical care. Now the situation has improved somewhat (there are no such serious problems with feeding and medical assistance), but the funds allocated are still insufficient.

Constant outbreaks of violence that regularly occur in penal institutions are evidence of a systemic crisis in the work of the Department. Yes, those held in prisons and colonies are certainly far from angels, but cases of beatings being used against convicts as a means to “break” complainants and the defiant are not isolated and cannot have any justification, the human rights activist is convinced.

Moreover, the system is closed to public control. According to Zakharov, there are no problems in this regard with the Ministry of Internal Affairs – specially created mobile groups regularly visit pre-trial detention centres and check the conditions in which detainees are held. However, relations with the State Department of Ukraine for the Execution of Punishments have not been established: colony administrations, as a rule, have a negative attitude towards visits from human rights activists.

Therefore, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group insists on reforming penal institutions in Ukraine. The Department must be transferred to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, as our state promised even upon joining the Council of Europe. A criminal-executive system that is too harsh operates in Ukraine, which needs to be revised towards leniency. Because courts often sentence to imprisonment those who do not deserve such punishment. In the opinion of Y. Zakharov, about 30% of prisoners in general-regime colonies could not be “serving time” at all.

By the way, as reported by “UNIAN”, a new concept for reforming the penitentiary system, developed in the Presidential Secretariat, “takes into account all the remarks of human rights activists and aims to create a flexible prison system, where the State Penal Service should become a civil service and a subdivision of the Ministry of Justice, as was done in all post-totalitarian countries of Central and Eastern Europe”.

It is expected that the President will sign a Decree on the approval of the Concept for Reforming the State Penal Service in the near future.

Reference by “PL”:

In Ukraine, about 200,000 people are held criminally liable annually, and about a quarter of them – almost 50,000 – receive punishment in the form of imprisonment. As of today, about 160,000 people are in penal institutions, of which more than 1,400 are sentenced to life imprisonment.