Some Causes and Conditions of Manifest Excesses of Authority by Penitentiary Employees: Unlawful Acts Against Inmates

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The authors examine the legal preconditions and the actual grounds for the specific relations between the representatives of penitentiary administration and persons serving sentences or persons remanded in custody. They point out some causes for the antagonism of these groups and pay attention to historical documents containing ethical and legal norms that prescribe benevolent relations between citizens in different legal and actual conditions. Thus, the authors discuss some clauses of the Manifest on Duels of April 21, 1787 and the Instruction to the Regional Supervisors of the Prison Castle of April 9, 1831 prepared by the members of the Council of the Ministry of the Interior in Tsarist Russia. They also comment on some norms of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, Federal Laws and instructions, according to which the work of officials in the penitentiary system is based on the principles of legality, humanism, and respect for human rights. The authors draw attention to human rights protected by international and inter-continental legal documents, and the observance of inmates’ human rights by administrations of temporary detention facilities, pre-trial detention facilities, pre-trial detention regime wards, and correctional institutions. It is noted that this observance is controlled by different authorized agencies. The authors present statistical data for different periods that reflect the number of cases of justified use of physical force and special devices by penitentiary administrations against persons held in isolation, the number of cases of unlawful acts of officers against inmates, as well as the number of initiated criminal cases. They enumerate and thoroughly examine the causes of unlawful use of physical force and special devices against inmates. Some of the presented causes are proved by the analysis of specific criminal cases, courts’ verdicts, and analytical reports of Russian Federal Penitentiary Service. The authors attempt to present a brief prediction of the causes and conditions that will influence the future state of this problem.