The number of prisoners is increasing. Ukraine’s prisons in the first half of 2010

Over the half-year of 2010, the number of people held in places of detention of the State Department for the Execution of Sentences, according to data contained on the Department’s website www.kvs.gov.ua, increased by 3,008 people (+2.04%) and amounted to 150,724 people as of 01/07/2010. The trend towards an increase in the prison population, which emerged in 2009, continued in the first half of 2010 and even strengthened.

The number of prisoners in institutions began to grow in 2009 for the first time in the last seven years. This growth amounted to 1,770 people (+1.21%). It occurred due to a significant increase in the number of residents in pre-trial detention centres — by 3,882 people (+ 11.4%). The number of convicted persons, meanwhile, decreased by 1,774 people in 2009. In 2010, the components of the overall growth in numbers expanded.

The number of people in colonies.

Over the half-year of 2010, for the first time in the last seven years, an increase in the number of convicted persons was observed — by 1,051 people (+0.97%). A certain sign of the stability of this growth is that in the last month alone — June — the number increased by 689 people, i.e., two-thirds of the growth for the half-year. The same trend is observed regarding convicted women. Over the half-year, their number increased by 94 people (reaching 6,405), moreover, in the last month alone — by 58 people.

The number of people decreased only in educational colonies — by 37 people (- 2.46%), which means an annual rate of decline at the level of - 5%. In 2009, this indicator was - 6.7%, and in 2008 – 15.6%. It is obvious that in educational colonies, a decrease in the rate of population reduction is observed.

The number of life-sentenced individuals increased by 37 people over the half-year (+2.3%) and amounted to 1,643 people, including 17 women. This corresponds to the rates of the previous year, when their number increased by 68 people over the year. But it is strange that during June, their number... decreased by 4 people. The department likely knows what this might mean. In total, over two and a half years, the growth in the number of life-sentenced individuals amounted to +12.3%.

In hospitals, as of 01/07/2010, 6,149 people were being held, with the number of people in hospitals increasing by only 9 people over the half-year, and in June, it actually decreased by 76 people.

The number of people in pre-trial detention centres.

The growth in the number of residents in pre-trial detention centres has been ongoing for two and a half years and is rapid and significant. While as of 01/01/2008, 32,110 people were held in pre-trial detention centres (a year before that – 32,619), by 2009, this number increased by 3,882 people (+11.4%), and over the following half-year of 2010 – by another 1,996 people (+5.24%). Maintaining the pace until the end of the year could yield over 10% growth for the year. The increase over two and a half years amounted to +24.6% to the level of 01/01/2008.

Identifying the causes of such a clearly pronounced trend requires separate analysis. At the same time, one can note certain regional features of changes in the number of residents in pre-trial detention centres.

Significant overcrowding of pre-trial detention centres is observed in Kyiv (+1,065 people), in the Donetsk region (+1,651 for three centres), Kharkiv (+738), and Simferopol (+713). Moreover, overcrowding in these centres has only increased over the last half-year.

A decrease in the number of prisoners in 2010 occurred only in five or six pre-trial detention centres — in the Odessa region, where there are two centres (- 53), in Sumy (- 25), in the Zaporizhzhia region, which also has two centres (- 10), and in Lviv (- 4) and Mykolaiv (- 8). And if in Sumy this led to a reduction in overcrowding to + 238 people, as in the Odessa region in total for both centres to + 42, then in Lviv, the Zaporizhzhia region (Vilniansk centre), and Mykolaiv, under-occupancy was already observed at the beginning of the year.

If we take into account that usually an increased level of occupancy of institutions (as a general rule, and the number of institutions themselves in the region) is observed in the east and south of the country, it looks somewhat unusual that stable under-occupancy of pre-trial detention centres is observed in the Zaporizhzhia region (Vilniansk), Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv.

Overall in Ukraine, 17 pre-trial detention centres remain under-occupied, and 15 are overcrowded. Among the detention centres that remain the most “spacious” are the pre-trial detention centres of Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Vilniansk, Lviv, Poltava, Chortkiv (Ternopil region), and Novhorod-Siverskyi.