Colony or prison? A look at penal institutions from a historical revisionist perspective

Abstract

After the October coup of 1917, under the slogan "from prison to educational institutions" appeared correctional labor colonies. The first agricultural correctional labour colonies were founded in Ukraine in 1920. In 1929, by decrees of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, the concentration camps were renamed into correctional labour camps, which were widely used throughout the Soviet Union for the purpose of colonizing deserted areas, uninhabited or sparsely populated areas, remote and unfavourable land, i.e. these institutions actually took over the functions of the colonies. Since the mid-1930s, the official name of another institution for serving deprivation of liberty, prison, has been restored. Soviet correctional labour camps, correctional labour colonies and prisons until the mid-50s operated on the same principles, were part of the unified gulag system. In 1956, a political decision was made to reorganize the correctional labour camps into correctional labour colonies. Since 1961, Ukraine's correctional labour colonies have been general, reinforced, strict and special regimes and prisons, which did not differ fundamentally in their qualitative characteristics, spatial and organizational structure or in the attitude of the staff to the inmates from their predecessors in correctional labour camps. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, correctional labour colonies in Ukraine were renamed into the twenty-sixth and twentieth penal colonies, and former prisons were named penal institutions. Despite the change in the name, the correctional labour colonies in Ukraine are the rudiments of the Soviet correctional labour institutions, where there is still a priory of forced labour, where there is a division into residential and industrial zones, where inmates are accommodated collectively in dormitories, where, owing to the impossibility of privacy in individual living quarters, there is a real threat to security, where the regime is an embodiment of punishment rather than a presupposition of assistance, care and guardianship, as in the past. Since there is no need to colonize remote areas in Ukraine, the time has come to give up centuries of imprisonment in penal colonies and create modern European-style prisons to serve their sentences.

У статті здійснено докорінний перегляд концепції функціонального призначення виправних колоній та аргументовано пропозиції запровадження замість покарання у виді позбавлення волі тюремного ув’язнення з відбуванням його у в’язницях.