Punishment as a crime. Why Russia's penitentiary system is to blame for recent inmate riots

RU

Staff shortages

In June, at the SIZO-1 correctional facility in Rostov-on-Don, six inmates claiming allegiance to Islamic State took two prison workers hostage — one of them the deputy chief for operations of the entire Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN). Special forces personnel ultimately killed five of the would-be terrorists, capturing the sixth while freeing the hostages. In the aftermath of the incident, however, it appears that FSIN addressed its deeper security problems by resorting to the simplest and least costly measures, aiming to assuage the agitated public while barely imitating a response to the threat: a few unimportant officials demonstratively resigned, Muslim detainees were forced to shave off their beards and cut their hair (contrary to the rules of pre-trial detention), and all inmates were deprived of household appliances like television sets and refrigerators.

Soon enough, however, fridges and TV sets returned to the cells, the price of banned cell phones stabilized, and prison life went on as usual. The system did not draw conclusions, nor did it take the measures necessary to protect, at a very minimum, its own employees. As for prisoners, their safety was never high on the system’s list of priorities.

When another hostage crisis occurred in August at IK-19, the attackers killed the prison's deputy chief of operations. Ironically, this is the operational service that is responsible for the internal security of FSIN institutions. Its officers should know everything about each inmate and each member of the staff: who is planning a crime, who is hiding a forbidden phone or has smuggled one into the prison, who is talking to fellow inmates, and what their conversations are about.

The latest series of tragic events only further demonstrates that the operational service is currently unable to perform its crucial function. There are many reasons for this: understaffing (the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service claims that the shortage of staff has reached almost 20% in 2024), the low quality of education at relevant academies, and the prioritization of red tape over fieldwork.

At the same time, the operational service is being burdened with more and more responsibilities that are irrelevant or even detrimental to its core function. At pretrial detention centers, its officers are supposed to help investigators push the “villain” to confess and possibly incriminate others. Sometimes, deadlocked investigations are resolved with the help of informants, or through forms of pressure that can include a deliberate, illegal, and unjustified deterioration of detention conditions. Such violations turn operations officers themselves into criminals before they even start to engage in truly corrupt practices.

In penal colonies, operations officers are tasked with solving crimes and obtaining confessions from convicts, which makes up the largest part of operative work and reporting. The war and recruitment of prisoners into the armed forces have created an additional burden, as the operational service also has to make sure the front gets as many new soldiers as the higher-ups demand. Pressuring convicts into signing military service contracts has become another objective of the operational service.

Special control must also be established over Ukrainian prisoners of war, some of whom are being held in Rostov's SIZO-1, for instance — in violation of international law. Naturally, this kind of control also falls under the purview of operative work. And of course, officers are also busy fabricating new justifications for terrorism cases against political prisoners already serving time, such as mathematician Azat Miftakhov, municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov, and blogger Vladislav Sinitsa.

As a result, operative officers have neither the time nor the energy to monitor the state of mind of each individual prisoner. Meanwhile, overlooking someone who might cause trouble is unacceptable. To avoid such negligence, the Russian penitentiary system employs preventive control — but only in theory.

A simulacrum of prevention

Initially, preventive control was not conceived of as an additional punishment. Creating a dedicated register of prisoners who are prone to drug use, escape attempts, suicide, or disseminating terrorist and extremist ideas is an efficient way of separating those who need special control from the rest of the prison population. Such individuals require the supervision of narcologists and psychologists (if the colony has any), observation of their whereabouts (for inmates with a history of escape attempts), and other preventive measures stipulated by the 72nd Prevention Guide of the Ministry of Justice. According to the guide, inmates are placed on the register based on information that they might be plotting something dangerous. In practice, however, the procedure has degenerated into what is called “charges-based” control.

In other words, an inmate accused of drug possession is automatically labeled as “prone to drug use” — even before they are sentenced — and individuals arrested after being on the wanted list are recognized as “prone to escape.” However, the most dangerous mishap occurred with convicts and defendants labeled as “terrorists” or “extremists.”

This register initially included those convicted of committing or attempting to commit terrorist acts, some of whom proclaimed their affiliation with ISIS. In recent years, however, the list has been expanded to include civil activists, politicians, poets, filmmakers, and bloggers imprisoned on the same charges of “terrorism” and “extremism.”

A seemingly reasonable measure turned into an encumbrance, only increasing the volume of red tape. In addition, it has also done penitentiary officers a disservice by diluting and devaluing the level of potential threat posed by any individual detainee bearing one of the fearsome-sounding labels.

“Here are the terrorists,” an officer will say, flipping through a thick folder that contains both possible ISIS militants and harmless bloggers who wrote something harsh on social media. In this paradigm, the officer sees a high-profile political prisoner who can get him in trouble with the higher authorities as a bigger threat than an inmate who could be hiding a knife in their sock.

“Special control” has lost its original meaning: control cannot be special if it becomes routine. Moreover, it is impossible to apply special measures to more inmates than is technically possible.

Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician who spent a long time in pre-trial detention centers and colonies and was himself subjected to special control, made this point when commenting on the tragedy at penal colony IK-19:

“In practice, preventive control lists in the colonies include thousands of people who have been found ‘prone to terrorism and extremism’ because of likes and comments on social media, donating ten dollars to an ‘undesirable organization,’ or participating in peaceful protests. Many completely peaceful people end up on these lists, while the real cutthroats are often simply ignored.”

A similar loss of the initial purpose occurred in connection with the control of “restricted items.” Internal prison regulations and annexes to Order 110 of the Ministry of Justice prohibit the storage and use of weapons, alcohol, drugs, and phones. Prohibited items are to be seized by officers, and their owners penalized.

However, the list of items prohibited in pretrial detention centers also includes a long range of safe, useful articles: plastic cutting boards and vegetable grinders, colored pens, copy paper, watches, kettles with a power of more than 0.6 kW, and so on. During searches, all of these must be seized without exception. Consequently, penitentiary officers no longer categorize “restricted” objects by the degree of threat they actually pose. According to the regulations, a watch or a lighter is no different from a knife, because they are all banned. As a result, the guards’ attention is stretched thin, leading to a situation in which cases of murder, escape, and extortion are not rare.

There is also the issue of recruitment to terrorist cells. In this case at least, phones capable of accessing banned websites really do pose a threat, as inmates can study their content and discuss what they saw with their cellmates.

The Muslim issue

A separate and complex issue is the confinement of Muslims. Concerning this part of the prison population, FSIN has no calculated or balanced policy, swinging from one extreme to the other. Take away their Qurans! Have them stop praying if the guard enters the cell for inspection! Make them eat pork like the rest of us, whatever their religion is! No more yelling out of windows and calling for prayer! Tell them to shave off their beards — rules are rules!

Those who resist must be placed in a punishment cell. It is no secret that punishment cells are often more than three-quarters full of Muslims, and the most stubborn of them become sworn enemies of the administration, meaning they may not get out of such cells for months.

Nevertheless, united, confident Muslims often achieve authority not only in the prison hierarchy, where they become informal leaders, but also among the staff, who treat the “bearded men” with a certain respect and even apprehension, sometimes ingratiating themselves with them.

If Muslim communities (cells and squads) are also well-funded, the servility of the prison staff, including the administration, can reach dangerous levels.

At the same time, despite declarations of the equality of religions, the Russian prison system discriminates against Muslims. If a prisoner is baptized in captivity, the FSIN regards it as a welcome development, worthy of mentioning on the service’s website. By contrast, if an inmate converts to Islam, they will be put on the preventive control register and listed as prone to spreading and studying extremist ideology. This is an unspoken rule, and a pretext can always be invented.

Nevertheless, cases of detainees adopting Islam are not uncommon. The religion fits well in prison: it is non-national and implies solidarity, mutual assistance, and often the protection of fellow believers from the pressure of criminals or the administration.

As for radical Islamism, the creed professed by the attackers in both SIZO-1 and IK-19, in captivity, it is fueled by rage, indignation, anger, hopelessness, hatred, and a thirst for revenge. The system is not geared towards reforming the detainees — or even making their lives tolerable — but instead is inherently characterized by callousness, indifference, injustice, hypocrisy, lies, and treachery.

All of these traits are often manifested by the officers communicating with inmates and the so-called “dark side of the force”: the brotherhood of thieves. Someone who finds himself in such a setting (especially for no good reason) and fails to adapt may feel broken and cease to value life, wanting only to put an end to their suffering. As a result, ISIS slogans about fighting the infidels become more likely to resonate.

According to human rights activists, Daniil Kamnev, one of the surviving attackers at Rostov’s SIZO-1 detention center, followed a path of this sort. An ethnic Russian, Kamnev first ended up behind bars at age 17 and converted to Islam in confinement. Seven years later, he secured early release but did not stay on the outside for long, soon facing charges of belonging to an extremist organization and preparing a terrorist attack, an allegation he categorically denied. During interrogation, Kamnev was brutally tortured. On Jun. 16, 2024, Daniil (Islamic name Khamza) and five more inmates took the staff of SIZO-1 hostage under the black banners of the Islamic State.

Nevertheless, reducing the entire ISIS threat to being the result of harsh and humiliating confinement conditions is also a misconception. These conditions certainly create a breeding ground for such tragedies, but it was not from prison that the terrorists burst into Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, massacring dozens of people. And it was not in detention facilities or after a period of incarceration that the prosperous men who attacked a church and a synagogue in Dagestan's Makhachkala and Derbent in June 2024 fomented their plans.

Russia’s penitentiary system copies the attitude of its government and security services, resolutely turning a blind eye to the real threats radical Islam poses. Under such circumstances, both the attackers themselves and a frustrated ISIS organization insist on taking credit for whatever atrocities might have been committed — it was us! We fired the shots! We sliced the throats! We built the bombs! And we’ll do it again! Why aren't you paying attention? However, the Russian authorities seemingly plug their ears, preferring to look for a Ukrainian or Western hand in the recurring massacres.

Instead of working proactively against the threat right before their eyes, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Investigative Committee continue to stuff prisons with opposition-minded teenagers and old ladies allegedly sympathetic to Ukraine, and detention facilities continue to take them under special control. As a result, all those services form an irrational system that prioritizes paperwork over human lives.

One cannot help but draw parallels between the actions of Russian security services personnel and of the terrorists themselves. The attackers at IK-19 tried to cut off one of the hostages’ ear, just as a similar injury was inflicted on one of the Crocus City Hall terrorists, who had his ear cut off by a law enforcement officer the morning after the massacre.

Furthermore, the bloodless seizure of the staff at SIZO-1, which ended in the “liquidation” of all attackers during the subsequent storming, set the scene for the bloodshed at IK-19, where the attackers began killing prison staff immediately, perhaps realizing that they would meet the same end in any case. With each successive event, the degree of barbarity rises as violence breeds not only fear, but also the desire to instill fear in others. I fear that the surviving inmates of IK-19 will fully experience the wrath and vengefulness of the system following the murder of the colony’s employees.

And as long as violence begets new violence, there is no reason to believe that the tragedies will cease. The graphic video with wounded and killed penitentiary staff, I think, has already reached pre-trial detention centers and colonies, as the informal prison “telegraph” works day and night. For a certain inmate, disenfranchised and cornered, it will one day become a recipe for what to do, a plan of action, an escape from suffering. I do not rule out that the IK-19 attack took shape and was carried out under the influence of footage from SIZO-1.

And today's penitentiary system as a whole has no way to counter this threat. It is inert and incapable of change, punishes any initiative, and turns a blind eye to cause-and-effect relationships. Even if it wanted to change for its own safety, it is still subordinate to the regime, controlled by the FSB, and dependent on the investigation, which leaves it no room for maneuver. All it can do is suffer and cause suffering to others.

In such circumstances, I would be extremely cautious about making emotion-driven demands for immediate action. Russian authorities are notorious for turning even the most salient ideas inside out, which has taught us to fear our desires. Punish corruption or employee negligence? Piece of cake. Replace the current staff with hardened sadists? Create incredibly harsh conditions for terrorists by placing them in “special camps”? Sure thing! But the brutal hostage-takers at IK-19 were not convicted under terrorist statutes — unlike many political prisoners. And it is the physically unimposing political “extremists” who end up in these camps. Calls to weed out corruption also will not solve the problem. The law provides convicts with a tiny fraction of life’s necessities, and corruption paradoxically makes their hopeless existence a little more bearable. For two packs of cigarettes, the whole cell can go to the showers not once, but twice a week. One pack gets them a walk in a spacious yard with pullup bars. Corruption makes it possible to get a banned phone and hear the voices of family members. However, you can use the same phone to browse a banned ISIS website. And you can also try to find, craft, or buy a banner and a knife.

Therefore, I agree with Ilya Yashin that it is impossible to partially reform the penal system, which directly inherited much of its character from the Soviet gulag. That’s why it must be completely dismantled, and a new one must be created in its place — a reasonable one, serving humanistic purposes. Only then will Russian prisons become both secure and safe, as will the rest of the country, provided it is destined to undergo a similar change.