The issue of the future of the Russian penal system was joined after Stalin's death, with two visions presented. One called for a conventional prison system focused on rehabilitation; the other (KGB) position proposed the continuation of a forced labor system in camps with strict terms of confinement. In the long run, both positions partially won the day. Russia today has a penal system that is a mix of Stalinist and Western practices.
Prisons remained under the jurisdiction of the MVD (now the MVD of the Russian Federation) until 1996, when they were transferred to local authorities. The Gulag system of camp administration was officially abolished in 1965, although prisoners continued to be assigned to work with hazardous chemicals and in timber cutting. Modern Russian penal legislation resembles that of Western countries, with prohibition of torture and inhumane practices. Russian prisons and camps remain overcrowded, with some 20 percent of the prison population incarcerated in detention centers due to lack of space. More than half of Russian prisoners are held today in overcrowded labor camps, where they work primarily in logging operations.3
The most striking legacy of this debate is the exceptionally high percentage of the Russian population institutionalized in prisons and camps. In 1970, there were slightly more than a million convicts. There were also innovations in the late Soviet period such as "punitive psychiatry,” which made political activities such as dissidence a mental illness, requiring confinement in mental hospitals. From that day on, political prisoners ended up in hospitals not in prisons. By the mid-1980s, the prison population doubled to more than 2 million.
During the disorder of Gorbachev's perestroika, the decline in convictions outweighed the increase in crime and reduced the number of prisoners back to 1.3 million by 1991. The Russian institutionalized population at the turn of the twenty-first century remained high by international standards (along with the United States) at one million, or 632 per hundred thousand, versus the world average of 86 prisoners per hundred thousand.4
World History
