Beginning this year, Russia is altering a prison system that dates back of 70 years to the time of Stalin, separating for the first time career criminals from the general prison population.
As the New York Times reports, currently, “the inmates are divided into barracks housing a hundred or so men without regard to the severity of their crimes. At night, a guard locks the door and walks away, leaving first-time offenders and people convicted of nonviolent crimes to fend for themselves in a crowd of gang members, hit men and other career criminals.”
The new plan calls for a three-stage dismantling of the barracks housing system and the abolition of all 755 penal colonies – the remains of Stalin’s gulag – by 2020.
One reply on “Russia Altering 70-Year-Old Penal Colony System”
It seems that the New York Times’ reporters do not know anything about the Russian prison system because it is very diversified and at the most times people with different criminal experience and people who committed different kinds of crimes are separated.