To put it mildly, it is impossible to call the situation in any penitentiary institution favorable. And it’s not just a matter of appearance, but also the moral side of the issue - deprivation of freedom still cannot be called a pleasant feeling, especially since it is not for a day or two.
However, even a simple cell in a prison or colony is not the worst thing that can happen. It is much harder to be in a cell that is intended for solitary confinement. What this room actually is and who it is intended for – we will talk about this further.
Camera view
A solitary cell is a small room that is intended for long-term occupancy of only one person. It should contain:
- One sleeping place - a wooden or metal bunk screwed to the floor.
- Bathroom.
- One point of lighting that must be protected by a grille.
Also, according to established standards, the room must have one window, no larger than 50 by 50 cm in size, and must be covered with bars.
In other words, solitary confinement for prisoners is far from the most pleasant place in a penitentiary institution - in addition to limited space, the lack of communication with other people and communication with the outside world also affects it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the law “On Amendments to Article 115 of the Criminal Executive Code of the Russian Federation.” The amendments tighten disciplinary measures for convicts serving sentences in prisons. For violating prison rules, they can now be legally placed in solitary confinement for up to six months. Important note: this disciplinary measure can only be applied to convicted men.
“Convicted men who are malicious violators of the established procedure for serving their sentences, held in special regime correctional colonies, are subject to transfer to solitary confinement for up to six months,” says the explanatory note to the bill. – For convicted persons serving sentences in prisons, in accordance with the Penal Code of the Russian Federation, for violations of the established procedure for serving a sentence, only penalties in the form of a reprimand, disciplinary fine, placement in a punishment cell for up to 15 days and transfer to a single cell-type premises can be applied. A sanction in the form of transfer to solitary confinement for convicts serving sentences in prisons, that is, in a correctional institution with a stricter regime than a special regime correctional colony, is not provided.
The authors of the amendments justify them by the fact that “convicts who pose a high social danger are serving their sentences in prisons.” The same law No. 902561-7 FZ increases the amount of disciplinary fines.
Old prisons have solitary confinement for prisoners.
The fortress wall, rampart, closed gates, even hooks on the gallows, a casemate are drawn, and on the roof of the casemate there is something clawed, iron, hooked - you won’t understand what.
Thus, these include the ghosts of an abandoned factory, eyeless mutant fish in Melochevka, a mysterious restless spirit in the Palace of Culture (allegedly in the former building of the city committee there is an underground casemate with a specially equipped torture chamber, and one of his victims is found here) and an extensive a network of caves under the entire city.
So, these include, without a doubt, the ghosts of an abandoned factory, eyeless mutant fish in Melochevka, a mysterious restless spirit in the Palace of Culture (allegedly in the former building of the city committee there is an underground casemate with a specially equipped torture chamber, and one of his victims is found), and an extensive network of caves under the entire city.
Lee ordered the gunboat's hull to be cut along the waterline, and then a new casemate to be built from wood, similar to the casemates of battleships.
If I and all the others who were living in the factories at that time were assigned for ten years (until July 1839) to the casemate of state criminals in Petrovsk, then this was a general temporary precaution, which is proven by the fact that when the 1st highest category of Decembrists was liberated and the casemate was destroyed, we, ordinary political ones, were again transferred to the mining department, in which we again enjoyed complete freedom of travel.
Either they will become intoxicated with attention, like a southern plantation owner at the sound of the march “Stepping Through Georgia,” or they will get angry and transfer the melody to another key with an ax and you to the dungeon.
The old watchman looked through his glasses at the beautiful Gorislava, rang the big bell, as expected, and, shuffling, trudged into the casemate to enter into the logbook: “On this date, at so many hours, the messenger ship such and such left for a mission.” ..." A curly, foamy breaker splashed from under the nose and splashed the concrete abutment of the breakwater.
Figures from the League of Defenders of Human Rights clearly wanted the casemate to stun the prisoners who were being judged by the Secret Leader.
Firstly, as soon as the ship enters the port, all passengers are captured: they are immediately captured by superior forces of customs officials and taken to a certain gloomy dungeon.
Secondly, the road to the casemate is fenced off with ropes as high as a man’s chest, and on the other side of these ropes all the Englishmen, who themselves recently suffered from seasickness and are now feeling well, gather, dressed in festive clothes, to enjoy the spectacle of the complete degradation of their fellow citizens .
III. Lieber meets Tocqueville and Beaumont, who study prisons
In September 1831, Lieber, at that time already a former director of the gymnasium, met Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont.
The travelers, as Lieber wrote in his diary, “came from France on behalf of the government to find out more about the character of the American people and the structure of the local prisons.” During the American tour, Tocqueville and Beaumont studied the internal organization of prisons, their financial and administrative structure, and also interviewed workers and prisoners of fourteen correctional institutions.
Lieber became Tocqueville's and Beaumont's guide to American prison and political life. His role in the study was primarily interview preparation, data collection, and interpretation of American institutions. What these interpretations were can be learned from Tocqueville's travel notes. During another walk around Boston, Lieber pointed out to his companions a gentleman passing by: “This is the sheriff, an army lieutenant, with whom we chatted yesterday at a reception at the mayor’s house.” Tocqueville and Beaumont recognized the man who had been calmly discussing executions all evening. In response to the expressed surprise, Lieber admitted that he had recently seen a sheriff strangle two people with his own hands, since in America sheriffs often served as executioners. Isn't being an executioner considered a shameful occupation? Not at all, explained Lieber, because “in executing a criminal, the sheriff simply obeys the law, just like the court condemning a criminal to death.”
In America, respect for people who carry out the dictates of the law comes from respect for the law itself - the profession of a policeman or tax collector is not associated with hostility or contempt.
Political thinkers of the first half of the 19th century, following the intuition of Jeremy Bentham, were interested in the practical side of the organization of prisons in the same sense as in the theoretical foundations of democratic government. The prison, they believed, was an exclusively democratic institution and made it possible to maintain egalitarianism in the administration of punishment, and therefore embodied the idea of equality before the law. Other punitive practices, such as fines, punishment, confiscation of property, the whip, loss of privileges, exile, or hard labor, implied and produced inequality. Prison, on the contrary, was a simple form of “deprivation of liberty” available to every member of a democratic society. In this sense, the gradual replacement of old institutions of punishment with prison signaled progress: “civilized nations have reached an agreement that the restriction of personal liberty is the best punishment for the greatest number of crimes in the greatest number of cases,” writes Lieber. Prison is the “victory of mind over matter,” the ultimate tool of punishment that not only preserves equality in democracies, but also makes the prisoner more adaptable to life in a democratic society.
If “silence, labor and the inevitability of punishment” can have the same effect on different people, then with a reasonable approach to the prison organization, it is possible to arrange its work in such a way as to achieve “the greatest effect with the least means.” What is this effect? A democratic state is a moral entity established by people in the pursuit of historical perfection - both individual and collective. An individual goes against his moral nature and commits a crime, and the state, through restricting unreasonable freedom, returns him to the right historical path. The prison was an instrument of moral succor, the highest good that democracy can give to the individual.
As a result, supporters of this view, including Lieber himself, opposed the use of corporal punishment, the practice of pre-trial detention and prosecution of the individual after release, and also criticized the system of pardons.
The democratic state punished routinely and inevitably, but without encroaching on the moral dignity of the citizen and without affecting his physical body.
I. Lieber follows the path from moral philosophy to political science
Throughout the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, the study of politics in the Anglo-Saxon world was led by moral philosophy.
In the system of moral philosophy, the rights and responsibilities of a person in relation to himself, other people, the state, as well as the rights and responsibilities of states in relation to each other were subject to study. The first two categories were combined into the “ethics” subsection, the other two formed the “politics” subsection, which studied the theory and practice of organizing a moral state. In the second half of the 19th century, in the American academy, politics moved out of the purview of moral philosophy and into the hands of political scientists. This transition took place in two dimensions, the intersection of which forms modern disciplinary knowledge - institutional and intellectual. First, the study of politics has moved from schools and colleges to research universities. Secondly, the study of politics from deductive, closed and based on the idea of a top-down hierarchy has become inductive and open, and the hierarchy has become ascending, that is, directed from facts to generalizations.
The founders of political science made a distinction between the moral state and the government. Next, they historicized the government, leaving the state with a timeless status - now the state seemed to be an immutable unity, outside of history, but governments were transitory, they were established and destroyed without affecting the integrity of the organic state. Finally, they began to study specific historical governments using the comparative method. Thanks to these inventions, the new political researchers, in contrast to the moral philosophers of the old formation, were able to discover, integrate and catalog historical facts about politics, as well as establish the laws of political development.
Only one of the three "transitional" inventions, namely the distinction between the ahistorical state and the historical government, bears the name of a specific author - Francis Lieber, who was himself a transitional figure. Although he rightly has a special place in disciplinary history as the first professor of political science, holding the chair at Columbia University from 1858 to 1865, it would not be wrong to call him the last moral philosopher. Although his name is associated with the beginning of the institutionalization of political science as a university discipline, most of Lieber's activities took place outside the university walls. Finally, although the distinction between state and government was the greatest achievement of his theoretical thought, the reason for making such a distinction was a purely practical question, which Lieber undertook to answer at the very beginning of his career. The question was: which model of prison organization should French reformers choose, Auburn or Philadelphia?
