Vol. 15 No.6 (June 2005), pp.568-571

SURVIVING RUSSIAN PRISONS: PUNISHMENT, ECONOMY AND POLITICS IN TRANSITION, by Laura Piacentini.  Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2004.  240pp.  Hardback. £35.00 / $64.95.  ISBN: 1-84392-103-0.

Reviewed by Kathryn Hendley, Department of Political Science and Law School, University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Email: khendley@wisc.edu .

Russian prisons have long been a “black box” for Western social scientists.  For the most part, our primary sources have been limited to prison memoirs and official reports, both of which inevitably tell only part of the story.  In SURVIVING RUSSIAN PRISONS: PUNISHMENT, ECONOMY AND POLITICS IN TRANSITION, Laura Piacentini fills in many of the gaps.  Thanks to her courageous and inventive field work in prisons in Smolensk and Omsk, we are treated to more of an objective insider’s view of Russian prisons than previously available.  As she acknowledges, the picture is still not complete.  Two prisons cannot possibly tell the story of an entire system, particularly in an era in which centralized control was dissipated.  Indeed, one of the most important insights of her book is the individuation of prisons in the post-Soviet era as each fashions its own strategy of survival through turbulent economic times.

As a student of post-Soviet Russia, I found the most compelling portion of the book to be the two case studies.  After documenting the breakdown of the Soviet penal identity in the early 1990s, Piacentini traces the choices made by prison officials in Smolensk and Omsk.  In Smolensk, for example, the goal of imprisonment has become rehabilitation rather than punishment.  These goals were shared by prisoners and staff alike.  In a remarkable move away from the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which saw prisoners as social deviants, prison officials now take a psychological approach, seeking to understand what drove the prisoners to crime and to engage in character reform during their incarceration.  They endeavor to enhance prisoners’ self-awareness in order to make them productive members of society.  Their methods include both psychological testing and counseling as well as religious training.  Forced labor has no place in this world and, not surprisingly, the percentage of the prison population so engaged has declined from a firm 100 percent before 1994 to less than one-half.  Prisoners describe the work space as “depressing” and “crumbling” (pp.58-59).  Vocational training, however, would complement the effort at rehabilitation.  But the economic realities of the 1990s, during which Russia experienced a profound economic depression that was magnified in the manufacturing sector, mostly eliminated such opportunities.

Prison officials in Omsk have taken a different path.  Rather than character reform, they are concerned with social reform.  Piacentini reports more of a nostalgia for the Soviet past in Omsk than in Smolensk.  This reflects a yearning for the stability and predictability that characterized those decades.  Within the prison, officials [*569] tried to rebuild the social cohesiveness that they felt had been lost with the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Labor remains an integral part of prison life in Omsk.  A majority of prisoners work regularly, though the purpose behind work has changed since the Soviet era.  No longer is it a form of slave labor; nor is it necessary to sustain the Russian economy.  In the words of the head of educational training, “it is about providing prisoners with a window to the outside world.  These goods [being manufactured] can be found in the home.  I think that prisoners need to be reminded of home when they are here, to minimise any future problems to do with adjustment” (p.71).  To this end, Omsk has created a network of Community Liaison Partnerships that allow prisoners to work in the community.  Just as in her analysis of Smolensk, Piacentini weaves the prison ideology together with the economic realities.  These community partnerships not only help prisoners’ readjustment, but also provide a much-needed source of income for the prison.  Likewise the continued vibrancy of prison industry is tied to the needs of the local community.

Piacentini convincingly argues that rehabilitation motivates both sets of prison officials.  But she is able to go deeper and to document how remarkably different means can be used to pursue this ostensibly similar goal.  The breakdown of staff specializations in the two prisons, summarized in tabular form, crystallize the differences beautifully.  We need only compare the priorities placed on those with industrial expertise as opposed to those with psychological expertise.  Omsk’s staff is dominated by those engaged in industry.  In the strict regime facility, it employs 248 on its industrial staff, compared to only 12 on its psychology staff.  By comparison, the Smolensk strict regime facility employs 85 on its industrial staff and 45 on its psychology staff (p.81).  Throughout the book, she wisely supplements the revealing thick descriptions that her interviewing and observations have yielded with tables that provide snapshots of her respondents’ attitudes.

The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the virtual abandonment of prisons by the central government.  During the 1990s, the Kremlin’s funding for prisons dropped precipitously, just as it did for all social obligations.   The officials whom Piacentini interviewed spoke passionately about the unusual challenges of this period.  As one senior official told her, “Every day, I worry about finding ways to ensure that my prisoners eat the recommended bread allowance” (p.127).   Another remarked, “It is about survival.  Having decided not to send us money and having decided not to provide resources for prisoners and staff, the state has left us with no option but to seek help from families and businesses” (p.129).   Officials responded by trying to make do with what they had.  To this end, they worked with local businesses to establish mutually beneficial barter networks.  Piacentini is no doubt right that neither of these prisons would have survived the 1990s without barter.  The analysis would have been even more persuasive had she placed it in a broader context.  Resorting to barter as a survival strategy was hardly limited to prisons.  It became commonplace for Russian industry more generally, as managers learned to survive in a largely cash-free environment.  To her credit, Piacentini [*570] notes the widespread nature of poverty, but fails to integrate this into her otherwise superb discussion of the role of barter.  I would also have welcomed an updating of the story.  The use of barter has receded considerably in recent years in industry, and I would like to know whether this trend has been mirrored in the prison sector as well.

Piacentini’s forthright discussion of how she organized the fieldwork should be read by all who are preparing for fieldwork in Russia or any other transition setting.  All too often scholars gloss over the “how” question.  Piacentini does not.  She takes the reader along the byzantine path by which she found herself inside two Russian prisons.  I particularly respect her willingness to share her creative strategies for building trust with the prison officials and her candor as to the difficulties posed by her age and gender.  Other young women who are embarking on challenging field work can take heart from her perseverance and ultimate success.  She deserves praise for sharing the bad with the good.  She consistently acknowledges that the restrictions placed on her access by the authorities – particularly their reluctance to allow her to talk with prisoners – limit her ability to draw conclusions.  As someone who has been doing field work in Russian legal institutions for over a decade, I came away from the book with tremendous admiration for Piacentini.

One disappointment in the book is the failure to address the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights dealing with Russia’s prison conditions.  To be sure, these decisions came after her field work.  The most well-known case, KALASHNIKOV v. RUSSIA, was decided in 2002.  But Piacentini’s discussion of the impact of Western human rights on the discourse and behavior of the Russian government does continue on into the present-day.  Given her emphasis on the potentially positive role that Russia’s membership in the Council of Europe can have on its prison policy, the choice not to discuss the ECHR is odd.  In the KALASHNIKOV case, as well as in others, the ECHR has been extraordinarily critical of the condition of Russia’s prisons.  Yet we know little about the aftermath of such decisions—i.e., whether the government has taken any action to implement the decision.  Piacentini would be uniquely positioned to comment on this question.  Likewise, I was surprised by her lack of attention to health conditions within the prisons she studied.  She acknowledges that “[c]ritics have argued that TB in the early 1990s was 17 times higher in Russian prisons than in wider society” (p.48), but does not report on the TB rate in the Smolensk of Omsk prisons.

Those interested in Russian law and politics will find much to engage them in SURVIVING RUSSIAN PRISONS.  After reading this book, I now realize the perils of generalizing about Russian prisons.  Her analysis of these two institutions shows that, in the post-Soviet era, prisons have become highly individuated.  I hope that others will build on her pathbreaking work to fill in the gaps of our knowledge about prisons in Russia.  Those without any background on Russia should not be wary of the book.  Piacentini does a superb job of setting the stage by summarizing the Soviet experience, building on the wealth of existing literature on the GULAG.  Students of [*571] prisons more generally will find a wealth of information.  Piacentini is trained as a criminologist and it shows.  Not sharing this background, I cannot speak to the novelty of her theoretical contributions in this field.  But I can confirm that she actively engages the literature and uses it productively to compare Russia’s experience to that of other transition countries, such as Northern Ireland and South Africa.

CASE REFERENCE:

KALASHNIKOV v. RUSSIA (47095/99) [2002] ECHR 591 (15 July 2002).

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© Copyright 2005 by the author, Kathryn Hendley.