Away from the GULAG! An outline of prison reform

Undoubtedly, the current level of development of Ukrainian society cannot be considered satisfactory. In many respects, this is explained by social stereotypes carried over from the Soviet past.
Some of our compatriots still view the state as a patrimonial master that has a legitimate right to their dignity. Naturally—in exchange for feigned prosperity.
According to this logic, most segments of modern Ukrainian society are degrading. One of the signs of this process is the deaf resistance to any attempts to reform social institutions.
In this sense, the criminal-executive system, in which the familiar features of the Soviet camp are becoming increasingly clear, stands on the same level as the unreformed pension system and the destitute everyday life of the armed forces.
Unfortunately, human rights activists did not notice how a silent consensus occurred among well-known politicians and government officials regarding the future fate of the prison system: it was decided not to touch it for an indefinite period.
Arguing for such a decision behind closed doors was quite simple. Firstly, reforming the criminal-executive system, from the point of view of electoral sympathies, looks ambiguous. Secondly, no political force will take responsibility for such an “ambiguous” reform.
As we can see, the persistent question regarding the lack of material and financial resources was not even placed on the agenda, because the very possibility of prison reform exists in a different, political, plane.
But political will alone will not help the matter, because a clear understanding of the complex of problems accumulated in the prison system and the definition of real ways to overcome them is no less important.
All three prerequisites for prison reform—political will, understanding of the subject, and a clear programme—are equally important for the success of the state’s penitentiary policy.
The breadth of the tasks set and the lack of time force the author to touch only upon a draft version of a possible prison reform, which, beyond any doubt, must provide for the creation of a new model of an institution for the execution of punishments (IEP), an increase in the prestige of the penitentiary profession, and the demilitarisation of the socio-psychological and medical unit of the criminal-executive system (CES).
1. The new IEP model is not a matter for the penitentiary staff themselves. This model must correspond to the general idea of modernising Ukrainian society, which is unlikely to involve the preservation of the barracks forms of collectivism that the Department for the Execution of Punishments offers us in the “model institution” project.
The implementation by the Department of this project at the base of Bila Tserkva EC No. 35 did not solve the main issue in modern penitentiary practice—the differentiation of the individual will of an imprisoned criminal and the imposed behavioural stereotypes of an antisocial environment. And although the resolution of this task does not yield a quick result in terms of reducing the risks of recidivism, this is still the main prerequisite for the effective use of traditional psychological-pedagogical methods in institutions for the execution of punishments.
The liberation of a criminal punished by the state from the pressure of the social-group sanctions of a deviant environment is, unfortunately, incompatible with the currently established practice of punitive-educational influence.
A system of barracks-style detention of convicts, which is quite acceptable from the point of view of departmental interests, must be revised in favour of a block system with greater control over the state of physical and psychological preservation and the subsequent resocialisation of the criminal’s personality. Of course, such a prison cannot be introduced immediately. Its model must become a subject of consensus among scientists and practitioners, the public and politicians, who, through joint efforts, are obliged to establish the limits of state coercion in the process of executing a sentence in the form of deprivation of liberty and to define clear parameters for the effectiveness of institutions for the execution of punishments.
It is pleasing to note that the relevance of the issues raised has to some extent received recognition from modern Ukrainian scientists, therefore, we can hope for the appearance of more detailed expositions of the idea of a “new IEP model” in the near future.
2. The logic of institutional changes in the CES will not find real embodiment as long as the department’s personnel policy remains an imprint of the Soviet “terror machine”.
Much is said about the hard and thankless work of penitentiary staff, yet most of those who howl loudly from high podiums about the existing social problems of the personnel have not lifted a finger to objectively investigate and improve working conditions for at least their own subordinates.
These pompous comrades, having first stripped three skins off their employees, then point out to the state that, lo and behold, it must more carefully protect these poor wretches.
Before the state, as a settled fact, is placed the task of social and medical rehabilitation of pensioners who have barely worked for fifteen years in the bodies and institutions for the execution of punishments.
This human capital, crushed by the system, flees with minimal pension seniority into the national economy. And increasingly, the management staff of prisons acts in this way along with the rank-and-file employees.
We must admit that the question of the state’s role in the social protection of penitentiary staff was incorrectly posed from the very beginning. The truth about the exhausting conditions of service artificially created by departmental regulations was silenced.
Instead of proposing new economically justified approaches in the field of increasing personnel service resources, the Department for the Execution of Punishments preferred the serial production of thirty-five-year-old pensioners.
It is precisely in this way that the CES gets rid of the professional core of the service. Young pensioners happily leave the system, taking with them a great potential of unused experience.
Such a scheme of “short-distance sprints” is disadvantageous to the state and society. After all, large resources are diverted to training and overcoming the professional mistakes of the next generation of thirty-five-year-old pensioners, who view their prison service mostly as a temporary and unpleasant episode in life, which is worth enduring for the sake of a quick pension.
Such a personnel incentive system turns the entire criminal-executive policy of the state upside down, which has no long-term perspective due to the elementary lack of interest of personnel who see their future, rather, in the possibility of a quick break from the system.
Correcting the outlined situation is a troublesome and unpopular task, but certain steps to halt the degradation of the domestic prison must be taken right now.
First, the Department needs to carry out a review of the established workload standards for each category of personnel (taking into account objective medical-social and psychological parameters of professional activity). Second, a minimum retirement age for prison personnel must be set at 45–50 years. Third, it is necessary to secure the right to preferential seniority for pension calculations only for employees of IEPs and pre-trial detention centres. Fourth, the calculation of the minimum wage for CES personnel must be conducted in connection (in coefficient ratio) to the minimum wage defined by law.
It would not be superfluous to propose changes to the legislation regarding the creation of a professional union of employees of bodies and institutions for the execution of punishments, which would deal with the real protection of the socio-economic rights of the personnel, which the Department for the Execution of Punishments is, for objective reasons, incapable of doing.
3. In the course of reflections on an undesirable variant of the development of world punitive practice, the Russian publicist Valentin Golbert voiced the idea of “spatial control devoid of any moral ambitions”. It is unlikely that Golbert wished to embarrass the Ukrainian prison specifically, but it seems he quite clearly captured the principle of moral idiocy embodied within it.
The essence of this principle lies in the denial of morality in the treatment of individuals whose conduct, by court decision, has been recognised as criminal. It is irrelevant that we will not find this in any regulatory act, yet such rules are cultivated daily by the prison administration organisation itself, where the pinnacle of morality is the Regulations on Service.
Such a Ukrainian prison has been built for more than one year. And it is built, let us be frank, by the surprisingly coordinated efforts of the human rights-oriented public and responsible government officials. The former emphasise the dubiousness of “any moral ambitions” on the part of the state. The latter gladly agree with this and increasingly surrender the institution, humanitarian in its orientation, to the mercy of prison militarists.
As a result, we have a GULAG machine of violence, the barracks space of which has been finally cleared for intra-species fighting among convicts.
But our human rights activists and wretched government officials are not mistaken in everything. Indeed, the imposition of moral precepts is an inadmissible phenomenon for a free society, even in such a peculiar segment of it as places of deprivation of liberty. At the same time, we must clearly understand that morality is born in a situation of free choice. Therefore, the task of the state and its representatives on the ground is the correct modelling of such situations, where the very conditions of serving a sentence will stimulate the conversion of convicts to a socially acceptable way of life. This is the alpha and omega of morality, which the state must demonstrate in the process of executing a sentence.
The primary unit of such pro-social modelling is, undoubtedly, the convict’s dignity, which, for objective reasons, cannot today be perceived by the administration of places of deprivation of liberty as a functional component of the process of executing sentences. This is hindered by the need to maintain proper internal order in barracks-style detention conditions, the Department’s active fight against crime, and the lack of adequate personnel provision for places of deprivation of liberty, etc.
At the same time, a corner-stone prerequisite for the dehumanisation of institutions for the execution of punishments is their pervasive militarisation. Supporters of this phenomenon often resort to a metaphor that characterises all CES services as one strong fist. In doing so, they forget to explain what “fist-based” prison medicine is, or, at the very least, “fist-based” prison pedagogy.
In reality, the coordinated actions of prison personnel, which supporters of militarisation insist upon, are not always professional actions, as they are often conditioned exclusively by relations of subordination, which crudely prevail in the everyday activity of personnel to the detriment of their professional position.
For European penitentiary experts, these things are obvious. After an exploratory visit to Ukraine in 1996, experts from the Council of Europe proposed that the Ukrainian government take a number of measures for the reform of the CES, among other things, the following:
- discontinue the use of military ranks and military uniforms by penitentiary service employees;
- adjust staff training programmes in such a way that they more accurately take into account the nature and scale of their social work;
- make efforts to ensure that staff and prisoners understand: the main task of the prison doctor is to be a private doctor for every prisoner, and that medical staff are obliged to do everything possible so that the prison environment does not create a threat to the physical and mental health of sick prisoners;
- exclude from the training programmes intended for the preparation of penitentiary service employees the training in the handling of weapons, drill training, and other exclusively military training elements.
The outlined proposals were not heard in the prison department. Its leaders for a long time openly considered them a kind of Trojan horse, or, more so, a dirty European intrigue capable of undermining the fundamental principle of domestic prison affairs: the principle of coordinated obedience.
In this sense, the readiness to implement the proposals voiced almost a decade and a half ago is an indicator of readiness to transform domestic institutions for the execution of punishments from an instrument of blind repression into a social institution capable of positively influencing a criminal’s personality.
The latter, undoubtedly, is the work of professional psychologists, pedagogues, and doctors, who in their official activity must unite exclusively on the basis of professional principles, and not with the help of “fist-based” discipline. And only then will our prison become effective when, within it, the title of doctor or pedagogue carries more weight than the fittings on a uniform.