Introduction This book, titled Situation of Prisoners in Contemporary Russia, is the second publication in a series of thematic human rights monitoring studies carried out by the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG) and a network of regional human rights organizations all across the Russian Federation.(1) The summer of 2001 saw the appearance of the first report in the given series, Nationalism, Xenophobia and Intolerance in Contemporary Russia, which has been extensively covered in Russian and international media and broadly welcomed by a number of domestic and international organizations and experts. In the fall of 2002, MHG and the regional human rights organizations launched a new thematic monitoring effort aimed to look at the conditions of prisoners. Notably, the human rights situation at Russia’s closed establishments has been defined from the very beginning as a key monitoring issue under the project Human Rights Monitoring Network in the Russian Federation. It is precisely in those facilities, devoid of civilian oversight mechanisms, that the human rights situation has become particularly worrying. The conditions of detention and the observance of the rights of prisoners have been closely watched by local human rights activists from the very first days of the human rights movement in the former Soviet Union. Given the rather large numbers of political prisoners in the former Soviet Union, the flow of information from “prisoners of conscience” to the outside world had been put on a solid footing. After the massive release of political prisoners at the end of the 1980s, reports on the confinement conditions at Russian penitentiary facilities ceased to be delivered on a systemic basis. In the years that followed, human rights activists carried targeted surveys of institutions of the Criminal Implementation System (UIS), and staged actions aimed to provide humanitarian and other kinds of assistance to prisoners. Nowadays, the living conditions of prisoners have become even more dire than in Soviet times, according to evidence received from penitentiary facilities. Apparently, this trend has primarily been related to the growing numbers of prisoners. Throughout the 1990s and until recently, Russia had steadily held the first place in numbers of prisoners in relation to the population, with this infamous championship yielded to the United States only quite recently. Clearly, the compelling need for a large-scale effort to look at the current conditions of prisoners was long recognized by the human rights community. Now, a whole range of Russian non- governmental organizations (NGOs), with the Center for Assistance to the Criminal Justice Reform first and foremost, have focused their efforts on the problems encountered at penitentiary facilities. Furthermore, they are actively seeking to change the conditions at those institutions, including through the application of alternative punishments and the radical reduction in the number of prisoners. At the same time, it is evident that in Russia, with its 89 regions, any country-wide monitoring initiative can be carried out only under the proviso of an accessible and smoothly run monitoring network with organizations-members in all Russian provinces. MHG has created and is now coordinating the activities of the only such network in Russia today, and thus became the facilitator of this monitoring effort. The completed monitoring survey has been multidimensional in character. In addition, the effort undertaken with our regional partners in the area of prisoners’ human rights, appears to be without precedent, since this is the first time such an effort has been accomplished on an All- Russian scale, using a single set of thoroughly developed and detailed methodological guidelines. Regional NGOs have been involved in gathering statistics and other valuable information, approaching relevant authorities (local penalty execution departments, prosecutor’s offices, and other), and conducting interviews across the social spectrum. Something of great relevance and without precedent was the inspection (with the filling out of detailed site survey maps) of 117 penitentiary facilities (41 pretrial detention facilities (SIZO), 74 colonies, two prisons).(2) The fact that in the months of October-November 2002 human rights activists managed to penetrate such a large part of penitentiary institutions in the Russian Federation has become a high-profile public campaign in itself. This action revealed the great concern of civil society over the plight of this special category of people, whose rights have been seriously restrained and who are in urgent need of protection against the widespread practices of cruel and degrading treatment. It also represents a very big step on the way to the establishment of a permanent system of public oversight with regard to penitentiary facilities. The basic international standards for the treatment of prisoners are proscribed in the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (SMR) adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1955. SMR are one of the oldest baseline documents adopted by the United Nations. In 1957, SMR were endorsed by the UN Economic and Social Council, and in 1977, SMR were updated to cover those prisoners who were not yet formally charged. Although SMR were not adopted as a legally binding treaty, their provisions have been broadly regarded as basic rules that “have tremendous significance and huge implications for the progressive development of criminal justice policies and practices.”(3) Hence, following the principles of human rights monitoring, it was logical for us to structure the monitoring methodology and design an outline for the prospective report on the basis of this fundamental comprehensive standard for the protection of human rights of prisoners. To be more specific, our methodology was built exclusively on the first part of SMR, particularly since this part of SMR carries rules applicable to any and all categories of prisoners. In view of the grand scale and tremendous complexity of this monitoring effort, we chose not to cover some specialized penitentiary institutions (educational colonies, special psychiatric establishments, disciplinary battalions, medical correctional facilities, etc.). Following the completion of the field research, we found ourselves with a huge body of qualitative and quantitative information about the condition of prisoners held at numerous penitentiary facilities. Given the very impressive diversity of data, we had been able to paint a rather comprehensive picture of the situation in this sphere. Significantly, different types of data complemented and cross-checked one another. All survey maps, questionnaires, transcribed in- depth interviews and statistical data have been thoroughly verified and subjected to comparative analysis. We believe that under the current conditions, a fully credible and wholesome monitoring project cannot be completed without interviewing, because neither statistical reports nor one single inspection a number of penitentiary facilities would provide sufficient grounds to draw general conclusions. In the course of the monitoring effort, we conducted interviews with the following three groups of respondents: heads of penitentiary facilities, recently released convicts, and relatives of prisoners. The motivation behind this strategy was to cross-check the information accumulated from these different sources in order to be able to create as objective a picture as possible. Whilst site-visits to places of confinement enabled us to acquire first-hand knowledge of living conditions of prisoners today, interviews with former prisoners and relatives of those currently held in penitentiaries made it possible to collect data about the whole array of problems relevant to the past three years. In this way, we succeeded in fulfilling our principal goal: to investigate the situation, to provide descriptions of the more widespread abuses, and to reveal established trends. It is too early to speak about the exact extent of each identified phenomenon or problem attributable to penitentiary practices, or about one single major trend in this area. What we had done is only the first systemic undertaking along this challenging path. The overriding human rights monitoring goal is to continue tracking the problem on a systematic basis to change things for the better. As we proceeded with the monitoring work, we sought not only to build up a comprehensive picture of prisoner conditions across penitentiary facilities, but also to make an assessment of the changes generated by the ongoing multi-tiered penitentiary system reform launched after the Chief Department of Penalty Execution (GUIN) was transferred from the jurisdiction of Ministry of Internal Affairs to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice. The obvious, positive consequence from that structural change had been a dramatic fall in the numbers of prisoners (over 100 000) in the course of the year 2000. The willingness to carry on with the reform and achieve progress at the GUIN-run penitentiary facilities appears to be sustained. Importantly, our monitoring survey could not have been a success without a good measure of cooperation on the part of GUIN, which instructed its regional units to provide access for human rights monitors into penitentiary institutions. While understanding that much of the problems at penitentiary establishments are rooted in the Soviet system of penal camps and that no major change in this area can be achieved in