When can corruption in Ukraine cost you your freedom?!
According to official statistics from the State Department of Ukraine for the Execution of Criminal Punishments, as of 1 January 2010, there were 147,700 people held in penitentiary institutions (http://www.kvs.gov.ua/punish/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=66313&cat_id=66312). At the same time, the estimated number of individuals convicted for corrupt acts did not exceed 1%. In reality, the number of corrupt individuals in Ukraine’s prisons and penal colonies is much higher. It is simply that some are there by court sentence and thus appear in the statistics, while others are there by virtue of their employment contract. And while the former have already been caught and convicted for corruption, the latter have not yet been, and they continue to perform their official duties while working for the State Penitentiary Service.
The penal legislation of Ukraine defines the primary goal of the punishment execution system as creating conditions for the correction and resocialisation of convicts. Moreover, it is those who have committed or are committing criminally punishable offences who must be corrected. The process of correction is facilitated by 47,600 employees of the penitentiary system. Furthermore, they are, by and large, the ones who determine whether a person has been corrected or not.
At the same time, a convict is given a clearly defined period for correction — the term of imprisonment established by a court decision. This is precisely the time a person must spend in an institution of the penal system to undergo correction.
If a convict has been corrected earlier than the sentence provides, they may be released before the end of the term. This possibility is called parole in the Criminal Code of Ukraine (although this provision does not apply to all categories of convicts). In order for this possibility to become a reality, Article 81 of the Code stipulates that a convict, in addition to serving the necessary portion of the sentence, must prove their correction through 'conscientious behaviour and attitude towards work'. The criteria for assessing the degree of correction are presented in the Methodological Recommendations of the Department for Organising Work Related to Ensuring a Progressive System for Serving Sentences. At the same time, it is worth noting that neither the legislation nor the recommendations themselves explain the mechanism for their application.
Therefore, out of the 11 criteria presented in the document, it is very difficult to determine which are the most and which are the least significant. Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult to determine whether a convict has worked 'conscientiously' and 'honestly', and to what extent they have 'strived' to improve their professional level, as such formulations of the criteria are quite abstract and vague. Therefore, the prison administration has to fill them with 'content' independently — that is, at its own discretion. In such a situation, due to the lack of clarity and the ambiguity of legislative norms and procedures, it is very difficult for penitentiary institution staff to determine whether a convict should be recommended for parole or not. Corruption often helps to overcome this difficulty and reach the necessary decision. In various sizes and forms. But, one way or another, many convicts have to find ways to provide various benefits to the colony staff. For some, for instance, it proved sufficient to enrich a responsible member of the administration with a few reams of paper or building materials for repairs. Others had to 'settle' with money. For example, the 2,500 US dollars that one of the penal colony employees extorted from a convict (http://www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-375280.html). And this was just for a transfer to an institution with a lighter regime of detention. It is not hard to imagine what parole would cost with such an official.
Moreover, such cases are not isolated. To determine how often convicts enter into corrupt relationships with administration representatives when preparing for parole, the author conducted a survey of more than 30 people who had been released from places of detention. To provide a more complete picture, those interviewed were released from penitentiary institutions located in different regions of Ukraine. As it turned out, almost all those surveyed pointed out that the prevalence of corruption when preparing a convict for parole is at least 90%. That is, based on the survey results, one can assume that out of 100 people released on parole, 90 were involved in corruption.
In this regard, it is worth noting that corruption, as a rule, involves two parties. And if one of the participants in a corrupt act is released, the other remains in the penitentiary institution, earning their civil servant pension. At the same time, the Penal Code states that, among other things, the execution of punishments in Ukraine is carried out with the aim of creating conditions for the correction and resocialisation of convicts, and for preventing the commission of new crimes by both convicts and other persons.
Perhaps these 'other persons' are the employees of prison administrations, and perhaps they, too, will soon need correction; but how quickly this will happen, and whether it will happen at all in Ukraine, time will tell.
Vladimir Bocharov-Tuz, Creative Association 'TORO'
Contact group in Ukraine, Transparency International
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Additional information: The State Penitentiary Service of Ukraine consists of a central apparatus, 25 territorial management bodies of the State Department of Ukraine for the Execution of Punishments in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the regions, the city of Kyiv and the Kyiv region, and 184 institutions for the execution of punishments.
As of 1 January 2010, 147,700 people were held in 184 institutions of the State Penitentiary Service of Ukraine, including 38,000 people in 32 active pre-trial detention centres and 1,499 juvenile convicts in 10 educational colonies.