The Russian Penal System

Abstract

In 2012, criminal justice, sentencing, political governance, activism, punk music and free speech all met and meshed to create a veritable avalanche of debate and discord about Russia’s political culture and its criminal justice system. Events since March 2012 have dominated world headlines on an unprecedented scale, not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The sentencing of three young women, two of them mothers, from the Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot to two years imprisonment each for hooliganism by a Moscow court on 17 August 2012 attracted, and continues to attract, considerable political, public and international criticism. Angry at what Pussy Riot perceive as government policies that discriminate against women and the increasing restrictions over free speech and a free press in Russia under the recently re-elected President Vladimir Putin, the Pussy Riot collective held the kinds of unsanctioned concerts and spontaneous protests that are more familiar to Western ‘Riot Grrrl’1 bands. The detention of the female performance artists has raised numerous questions about Russia’s direction of political travel, with some commentators mocking Putin, in cartoons and in discourse in an often critical and outraged global media, as the chief architect of a return to Russia’s past.KeywordsCriminal JusticeHate CrimePrison PopulationPenal SystemPrison OfficerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.