The Russian Ministry of Justice has decided to ban swearing by convicts in SIZO pre-trial detention centers, or at least “socializing with other individuals using lewd, threatening, demeaning or slanderous expressions or slang.” I suppose that leaves open the opportunity to use it when talking to yourself without risking up to fifteen days in the punishment cell.
On one level, this seems an enterprise worthy of King Canute, attempting to hold back the tide of gangster slang, incidental obscenity and often-inventive mat – Russia’s distinctive vocabulary of obscenity – that washes around every prison in the country. One might as well try and ban Radio Shanson in taxi cabs, grumbling in lines, or snow in a Russian winter.
Yet this is not quite as token as it may sound, part of a wider program to ‘civilize’ the prison experience and make it less brutal and brutalizing an experience. After all, between the overcrowding, the violence (whether prison-on-prisoner or guard-on-prisoner), the epidemic of TB – and often drug-resistant TB, at that – and HIV, prison time is disproportionately scarring for many. The results range from the spread then of disease into the civilian population when inmates are released, through to high levels of recidivism and also psychological problems for ex-cons.
A particular point of interest has been trying to cut down on the use and transmission of fenya, the distinctive argot of Russian criminals for almost two centuries. The days when this was central to the organized crime subculture are over, but nonetheless its use is not only a signal of alienation or rejection of civilized values but also acts as something of a brutalizing influence. After all, when your basic vocabulary essentially dehumanizes others—in fenya, the word lyudi, ‘people,’ is reserved only for other criminals—it has an effect on how you relate to them. In 2013, FSIN, the Federal Penitentiary Service, banned prison staff from using fenya for this very reason.
Attempting to cut down on bad language in prisons may be something of a forlorn effort, but its heart is at least in the right place. Nonetheless, it does highlight the extent to which long-running attempts to reform the prison system, which have had some positive outcomes, still have quite a long way to go. (And the current financial and fiscal crisis may see things get worse.)
During the Medvedev era, a serious attempt was made to reduce the number of Russians behind bars. As, Justice Minister Konovalov admitted, “people ending up in prison is not the answer” to crime. There were amnesties, certain crimes were no longer expected to bring a jail term, and the lengths of many sentences were reduced. Even so, the majority of prisoners are still serving longer than the 3-4 years most research suggests is the longest term likely not substantially to increase the chances recidivism a failure later to settle back into a law-abiding life.
Limited progress was made, not least as more resources were provided to build and maintain proper prisons (to reduce overcrowding)—Krasnoyarsk’s SIZO-1 is generally reckoned to be one of the best to which to be sent—fund re-entry programs for prisoners close to release, and pay closer to a reasonable wage to prison staff to allow recruiting and retaining quality personnel and perhaps inhibit the worst corruption.
There are now online stores for Russian prisoners to buy essentials and a few luxuries. Nonetheless, the total prison population is still the third highest in the world, at almost 645,000, and the imprisonment rate is a depressingly high 468 per 100,000 citizens. (In fairness, still overshadowed by the world’s number 1 incarceration superpower, the USA, with a rate of 716 per 100,000.) Furthermore, what progress has been made has failed to change the overall tenor of the prison experience for most. From 2012 mortality rates in prison actually increased, and SIZOs—where most inmates sleep in barracks block rooms with 20-30 other prisoners, and where privacy, hygiene and security can be equally elusive—continue frequently to be cited as breaches in European Court of Human Rights judgments.
FSIN is used to dealing with violent expressions of prisoner discontent, not least through its heavily-armed special forces groups such as Moscow’s Saturn. However, the more widespread and pernicious response is mass self-harming, such as the fifteen convicts who slashed their wrists while being taken by train to a prison colony in Karelia republic last May, or the thirty-plus who did the same earlier than month to protest conditions in a maximum security prison in Amur.
Meanwhile, although prison warders are no longer allowed to swear at prisoners, an ordnance passed at the end of last year—emotively called the “sadists’ law” by its critics which, in an unusual display of bipartisan dissent, included both the Communists and the liberal A Just Russia bloc—formally granted them powers to “use physical force, including combat methods of fighting, if non-forceful means cannot ensure that duties are fulfilled.” This may seem fair enough, until one consider that the broad terms of the law extend not only to foiling escapes or breaking up fights but conceivably such petty violations as continuing to sit on one’s bed when a guard enters a cell.
As in so many ways, Russia remains stranded in a three-way tussle between the urge for genuinely liberal reform, the limitations of poverty (or at least the poverty experienced by most public services), and a vicious relish for the order brought by the knout and the fist. From public health policies to dealing with domestic violence, it cannot decided whether it wants to be in the twenty-first or the nineteenth century, and whether it is willing to afford either.
And as for mat, it is likely to resist whatever the Justice Ministry may throw at it. After all, beards in Russia survived Peter the Great’s attempts to shave and tax them away, and drinking Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. Besides, despite his 2014 decree banning certain obscenities on film and stage, President Putin himself is not averse to dabbling in a little creative vulgarity, whether out of natural proclivities or to burnish his bad boy credentials. Some aspects of Russian life really are bred deep in the bone.
