HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRISONS OF CLOSED TYPE IN UKRAINE

Abstract

The Russian Empire had no such penalty as "imprisonment" under the criminal law, which was in force at that time. After the October revolution of 1917, when the bolsheviks came to the state power, due to the total plunder of the country, it became clear that the prisons with the conditions of confinement, which had been provided before, were extremely burdensome for the Soviet State. In those circumstances, the creation of the legal basis for the application of the new criminal punishment in the form of imprisonment was initiated. The first step was the Provisional Instruction «On deprivation of freedom as the measure of punishment and the order of its execution», which was approved by the Resolution of the People's Commissariat of Justice of the Russian Federation on July 23, 1918. It envisaged the creation and organization of the fundamentally different system of the places of deprivation of liberty. Similar Provisional Instruction «On imprisonment as the type of punishment» was introduced in Ukraine in 1920. Besides the introduction of the correctional labour prisons for the working people, since 1919there was the system of the forced labour camps, which were subordinated to the People's Commissariat of Justice.

In 1925 the Labour and Employment Code of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic envisaged the abolition of the traditional prisons and the development of the network of the agricultural, artisan and industrial labour camps with the obligatory work of the convicts. Since 1929 the correctional labour camps system (GULAG) executed the sentences related to imprisonment. Its main purpose was to solve the major economic problems, the development of the remote northern and eastern regions of the Soviet Union by using the forced labour of prisoners, their merciless exploitation, which became the real factor in the country's economic development. The GULAG system included both the forced labour camps and the correctional labour prisons.  Since the middle of 1930s the traditional prisons were introduced. According to the Criminal Codes, which were adopted in 1960 in all the republics of the Soviet Union, since 1961 the imprisonment was executed at the correctional labour establishments of the general, strengthened, strict and special security regimes.

Since 2004 the deprivation of liberty is executed in Ukraine at the correctional establishments of the minimum, average and maximum security regimes.