Places Of Imprisonment Research Articles

The evolution of the goals and conditions of the execution of the penalty of deprivation of liberty from the Middle Ages to the present day

The functions of prisons in old Poland, their role and organization changed along with the evolution of views on the objectives of the institution of punishment in the system of criminal law. The picture will be completely different if the punishment is to have a main rehabilitation effect, and another when the basic premise of the penal policy is the principle of deterrence, not the moral improvement of the offender (it was in Poland until the 18th century). The penalty of deprivation of liberty could be carried out in five different ways. The choice of prison was primarily determined by the type of crime committed, but also the state of the convict was very important. The first, as early as the 12th-13th centuries are prisons, in which the population of lower states, ie townsmen, and peasants, were imprisoned. Initially, they play only a preventive role. In the Middle Ages, an upper tower was also developed, mainly applied to the nobility, it was an institution in which convicted in decent, even home conditions performed his penance. In the modern era, ie in the first half of the 16th century, a lower tower is being established, often not so much a place of imprisonment, but a place of slow death. Significant changes in the character and function of penitentiary institutions were brought by the 18th century, which was connected with the enlightenment flowing into the Republic of Poland, under which the punishment was also to be a means of improvement and rehabilitation, and not only revenge. The practice of imprisoning people in the tower, which was only a place of penance, deprived of any rehabilitation factors, slowly disappears, while prison comes to the fore. Here, the marshal prison should be pointed out, constituting a symbol of changes taking place, a modern facility in which the convict punished in humane conditions for those times, but above all, he was cared for his moral improvement, so that in the future he would not return to crime. The houses of improvement and forced labor houses started to play an extremely important role, the goal of which was to improve the prisoners through work and prayer.

Теоретико-правовые аспекты ограничения избирательных прав граждан, находящихся в местах лишения свободы

In this article the main teoretiko-legal aspects of restriction of electoral rights of the citizens of the Russian Federation condemned are considered to serving of custodial sanction. The problem of discrepancy of the Russian electoral laws to the international regulations and standards concerning this category of persons in the part concerning realization by them of the right to choose is revealed and to be elected. Need of establishment of restriction of the electoral rights condemned as a separate auxiliary view of criminal sanction for the persons condemned is designated and proved for crimes against, the government, the world and safety of mankind, public safety and a public order. Expansion of the political rights of the persons which are in imprisonment places in the part concerning participation in a referendum, possession and use of an active electoral right is offered.

Social Support of Condemned Preparing For Release From Imprisonment Places

Social Support of Condemned Preparing For Release From Imprisonment Places

Więzienie w Kielcach w czasie powstania styczniowego

During the January Uprising in Kielce region fierce fighting took place. Therefore prison in Kielce, a provincial prison in poviat has become one of the most important places of imprisonment in the Polish Kingdom. In this prison were collected political prisoners from across the southern part of the government of Radom. This text is an attempt to present - on the basis of archival documents and the memories of prisoners - the conditions prevailing at that time in Kielce prison and the impact that the plight of the prisoners have people supervising their stay in prison, especially military chief General Onufry Czengery.

THE SECURITY ASPECTS OF PRISONS

Nowadays the prisons management and process control are based not only to physical security of prisons (premises, buildings, engineering equipment and technological equipment), but more to dynamic security (positive relationship between prison staff and inmates, based to rigidity and equity). The article reflects the results of the research about custodial sentence enforcement aspects of security in Latvian prisons. In this research are highlighted specificities of custodial sentence enforcement aspects of security in imprisonment places from point of view of rights of the custodial sentence enforcement law and practice. In this research are identified issues of the problem and suggested possible solutions. Within the framework of the research the norms of the Sentence Execution Code of Latvia, Prisons Administration Act and Regulations No.423 of the Cabinet of Ministers of May 30, 2006 – Internal rules of Penitentiary institutions, have been analyzed based on the safety aspects of the prison and its compliance with the requirements of generally accepted human rights, the Council of Europe and international norms and standards. Within the research the scientific literature and viewpoints from legal experts have been collected and analyzed. The aim of the research is to show, that the safety aspects of the prisons are insufficiently and inaccurately regulated and requires a deeper analysis. On the bases of this research were developed series of recommendations for prison staff to comply with the safety aspects of prisons as well as the necessity to make amendments in norms of the Sentence Execution Code of Latvia, Prisons Administration Act and Regulations No.423 of the Cabinet of Ministers of May 30, 2006 – Internal rules of Penitentiary institutions.

К вопросу о режиме содержания заключённых в местах лишения свободы в Западной Сибири во время Великой Отечественной войны

К вопросу о режиме содержания заключённых в местах лишения свободы в Западной Сибири во время Великой Отечественной войны

Условно-досрочное освобождение от отбывания наказания и его применение

The release on parole from serving sentence is the important institute of criminal law, stimulating law-abiding behavior of persons, committed a crime and condemned to imprisonment. The existing Criminal Сode of the Russian Federation allows any condemned to imprisonment to petition for the release on parole, including condemned to lifelong imprisonment. Given opportunity testifies to humanism and liberalism manifestation in relation to condemned and is undoubted achievement of the legislator. On application of the release on parole from serving sentence it is important not only to allow the persons, which have followed a way of correction, to leave imprisonment places ahead of schedule, but also, on the contrary, not to allow an early release of persons who actually didn´t follow a correction way. The solution of the problem is possible thanks to joint efforts of the legislator and law enforcers. In the article on the basis of the analysis of scientific legal literature and jurisprudence theoretical and practical problems of application of the release on parole from serving sentence are considered. Frequent changes of the article 79 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, testifying to lack of system approach of the legislator in the solution of the question of the release on parole are subjected to the critical analysis. The specified problem in the aggregate with the lack of uniform law-enforcement practice, according to the author, reduce value of the release on parole as incentive institute of the criminal law stimulating condemned to the law-abiding behavior.

Investigation of the controversial deaths in incarcerated population in Hunan province of China

It is generally true that the incarcerated population is one of the most vulnerable groups in almost every country. Although plenty of evidence on the health and deaths of the incarcerated population have been studied in different countries, there is still little availability of related information in China. Focusing on the Hunan province in the south central part of China, this paper aims to evaluate the characteristics of forensic pathology and epidemiology of the controversial deaths in the incarcerated population in China. During the evaluation process we have reviewed 61 cases which were autopsied by the Hunan Xiangya Judicial Identification Center from 2006 to 2013. The data are collected and analyzed from the point of view of demographics variables (age, gender, ethnicity and education level) and incarceration-related variables (number of incarcerations, place of imprisonment, cause of controversy and cause of death). The majority of the 61 cases are male (91.8%), and the leading age (63.8%)is within 31 to 50 years old. All the deceased are ethnic Han and most of them (75.5%) failed to complete the compulsory 9-year education in China. Jail (40.9%) and prison (32.8%) are the leading places where the deaths occur. The number of deaths during the study period exhibits fluctuations from year to year, with a slight decreasing trend. Violence-related death suspected by families and prosecutors constitutes 62.3% and has become the primary causes for disputes. Overall, 80.3% of deaths are due to illnesses, out of which 39.4% died of acute death, 26.2% of chronic diseases and 14.7% of infectious diseases; a cause of death not related to illness accounts for 19.7% of the total. The most frequent cause of death is sudden cardiac arrest (37.8%) in acute death; the cardiovascular disease (9.9%) is the most common cause of death in chronic diseases and suicide cases account for 14.9%, being the leading cause of non-illness related cases. Among the 61 controversial deaths reviewed in this paper, the causes of death are correlated with a diversity of factors. Therefore, it is necessary to take various preventive measures in order to decrease the number of deaths, depending on the different causes.

Szansa na lepszą przyszłość. Edukacja dorosłych w systemie penitencjarnym Azji Środkowej

Today it is hard to understand, what brought the human to the idea of imprisonment: punishment and hurting, use of convicted as cheap labour force or re-training of the violator. But in the 3rd Century one of the famous Rome lawyers wrote: “The prison should serve as a place of imprisonment not as one of a punishment”. United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners observes the convicted as personalities, being a part of the same society, which is existing outside penal institutions. Their return into the society’s life should be facilitated by providing opportunities for education, which could be continued after the release. During the last ten days DVV International gathered rich experience in the field of adult learning in the penitentiary system of Central Asia. The Author of the present article, Project Manager of those initiatives, describes the activity of DVV International in the field of Adult Education in the Penitentiary system on the example of three countries of Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Article contains approaches, methods and result of these actions.

Electronic Documents and Libraries in Imprisonment Places of Russia: Problems with Access to Information

In modern Russian conditions the number of persons held in isolation from society, is about 1 million people. Persons serving a sentence of actual imprisonment upon conviction, shall have access to the values concentrated in the libraries. Users of library services in prisons can get the information for their self-education with the help of the Internet .

Social aspects multi-drug resistant tuberculosis

The comparative analysis of features of clinical symptoms, spectrum and the importance of burdening medico-social factors of a tuberculosis of lungs with primary MDR М . tuberculosis in comparison with a drug sensitive variant of disease is carried out. Presence of associations between burdening factors of disease and MDR М . tuberculosis is proved. We defined degree of risk of detection MBT with MDR at new cases tuberculosis of lungs with narcotism, a tobacco smoking, a syndrome of alcoholic abuse, stay in imprisonment places, a diabetes of 2nd type, hepatitises B, C, В + С.

PROBLEMS OF MEDICAL AND SOCIAL ADAPTATION OF PATIENTS SUFFERING FROM SOCIALLY-SIGNIFICANT DISEASES SERVING TIME IN AND RELEASED FROM PLACES OF IMPRISONMENT

The article deals with the priorities of the work on the organization of medical and social adaptation of patients suffering from socially-significant diseases who serve time in or are released from the places of imprisonment.

The Mystery of the Past Haunts Again: Jane Eyre and Eugenie Marlitt’s Die zweite Frau

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a classic in women’s fiction. When it was published in 1847, it made an immediate impact in mid-Victorian England, partly because it drew on the paradigmatic story of a romance heroine, partly because it interpreted the needs of the women of the time. Since then, the Thornfield Hall attic where Bertha Mason is kept hidden by the master of the house, Mr. Rochester, has become the metaphor of a feminine place of imprisonment and,at the same time, of rebellion against patriarchal rules.About thirty years after Jane Eyre, another woman writer published a book which evokes the haunting atmosphere of the Thornfield Hall theme, i.e., the German writer Eugenie Marlitt, the author of Die zweite Frau ( The second wife, 1874).Interestingly, Marlitt seems to recapture, while rewriting it, the character of Bertha within the context of German domestic fiction. Bothnovels explore indeed the issue of the imprisoned and socially marginalised woman in terms of ethnicity to show how gender roles are inevitably complicit with power relations. In Jane Eyre and Die zweite Frau the house motif is a pivotal element that leads to our understanding of the female characters, but it is above all the mystery that reverberates through the houses of the two novels, represented by two women, the Creole Bertha and the Indian Lotusblume, which, being crucial to the articulation of the discursive thrust underlying the two narratives, discloses the multi-layered construction of femininity.

Funkcjonowanie oddziałów dla tzw. "więźniów niebezpiecznych" w Polsce

A series of mysterious deaths in prisons made the issue of persecution organs functioning, but first and foremost question the effectiveness of controls within the prison system, returned to the newspapers’ headines. In the large part the debate has been concerned with the safety of persons who may have important information regarding ongoing criminal proceedings. Opinions are divergent, and their authors often refer back to fundamental issues. The most important and arousing the strongest emotions ones among them are as follows: where is the limit of permitted prision isolation, and how should the special units for specific categories of offenders operate? The presented study is the result of research entitled “Wstepna ocena funkcjonowania oddzialow dla wieźniow niebezpiecznych” (“Introductory assessment of wards for particularly dangerous criminals”) which I carried out in 2007-2008. In the research, I examined the subject of the borders of the prison isolation, with particular emphasis on the effects of its escalation, for those who are the subjects, and for those who are executors of enhanced isolation alike. The research consisted of 10 case studies carried out on prisoners, who stayed in the special prison units with a very high degree of isolation for the longest time. Their period of stay ranged from 7 to 14 years. Penitentiary records of these individuals and the material gathered during the in-depth interviews were analysed. In addition to the presentation of the data collected during the research also contains an attempt to present a useful analytic scheme to describe and understand the functioning of this segment of the prison system, which is responsible for the isolation and control of the most dangerous criminal offenders and the most recalcitrant prisoners. The unit analysed was, so-called N ward, treated as an element of the prison culture and culture in general. The primary data source is the materials and documents related to the functioning of this segment of the prison system and the awareness of individuals participating in this social phenomenon. The latter is consistent with the assumptions of humanist criminology, in which an individual experience is a key vehicle for knowledge of the culture, and the knowledge should be searched there. The essence of this approach to the study of social phenomena is a recommendation by F. Znaniecki to study it with “the humanistic factor.” The study reconstructed the origins of wards with a high degree of isolation and it systemic rationalisation. The information collected, justify the hypothesis that the system of N wards in Poland was not prepared well enough. Ultimately there are 16 branches and with over more than 400 specially protected places of imprisonment created, despite the considerable cost, only because they were presented to decision-makers as one of the key instruments to combat the organized crime.

Соціальний контроль у вимірах формальної та неформальної моделей: адміністративний та соціальний супровід особи, яка повернулася з місць позбавлення волі

Соціальний контроль у вимірах формальної та неформальної моделей: адміністративний та соціальний супровід особи, яка повернулася з місць позбавлення волі

Terrorism and Habeas Corpus: A Jurisdictional Escape

Following the events of September 11, Congress authorized the President to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks … or harbored such organizations or persons.”1 Considering this surprising grant of authority, a question naturally surfaces as to whether a person whom the President has determined to have planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks has an absolute right to challenge this determination in a judicial forum through habeas corpus proceedings, regardless of issues such as nationality, venue, next-friend standing for those held incommunicado, and jurisdictional barriers based on the place of imprisonment.

Terrorism and Habeas Corpus: A Jurisdictional Escape

Following the events of September 11, Congress authorized the President to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks … or harbored such organizations or persons.”1 Considering this surprising grant of authority, a question naturally surfaces as to whether a person whom the President has determined to have planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks has an absolute right to challenge this determination in a judicial forum through habeas corpus proceedings, regardless of issues such as nationality, venue, next-friend standing for those held incommunicado, and jurisdictional barriers based on the place of imprisonment.

The Internment Camp at Terezín, 1919

Although the fortress at Terezín attained a dubious international distinction during World War II as the Nazi concentration camp. Theresienstadt, it already possessed a gloomy history as a place of imprisonment, having held Austrian political offenders since the first half of the nineteenth century. Gavrilo Princip had been confined there along with his fellow conspirators after assassinating Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo; the young man ultimately died in the garrison hospital. During World War I, Terezín became the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Bohemia, housing its mostly Russian prisoners in makeshift subcamps scattered outside the fortress. In 1919 the new Czechoslovak state employed some of these same facilities to intern various “suspicious elements” from Slovakia. Unfortunately the zeal with which the authorities took people into custody produced a flood of internees for which Terezín was ill prepared, and conditions in the debilitated Austrian camp soon threatened to provoke a public scandal. The circumstances of this rather unpleasant episode provide a revealing—though ambiguous—glimpse of the sterner side of the Czechoslovak First Republic, and by extension, post-Habsburg Central Europe.

PUBLIC IMPRISONMENT BY PRIVATE MEANS

Although privately operated imprisonment facilities were commonplace in previous centuries in England and the United States (Holdsworth 1922-4: 397; Crew 1933: 50; McKelvey 1977: 197-216; Feeley 1991), by the twentieth century, governments had assumed responsibility for nearly all imprisonment and most other criminal justices functions. Indeed, the principle of public responsibility for the administration of justice—and especially for imprisonment—has become so well established that impri sonment is seen by many as an intrinsic function of government (American Bar Association 1989: 3; Dilulio 1990: 172—7; Robbins 1988: 44; Howard League for Penal Reform 1990: 3). Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, a debate emerged in the United States, Britain, and in some other English-speaking countries over the propriety of governments contracting with private firms to operate and even own prisons, jails, and other places of imprisonment. This has gone beyond talk, for governments in the United States, Britain, and Australia are now contracting with private, for-profit firms to operate penal facilities of various types, and a private imprisonment industry has emerged (or, taking a longer historical view, re-emerged). This essay surveys developments in the United States, Britain, and Australia, the only countries that have so far moved to delegate operations of imprisonment facilities to private entities. The first section provides a thumbnail sketch of developments in these countries since the early 1980s, followed with a discussion of why private imprisonment emerged during this period. Some of the principal issues raised by private imprisonment, including some of the important research questions, are identified and discussed briefly.

Degrees of freedom

One cannot think of challenging the central place of imprisonment in modern systems of punishment without changing the penal system as a whole. This claim underlies the thinking behind a large part of the move towards the introduction of non-custodial intermediate sanctions, especially those served in the community. Critical questions about reducing the importance of imprisonment by changing the sanctioning system abound. Perhaps most prominent is the oft-reiterated claim that the extension of the range of non-custodial sanctions increases the size of the penal net without reducing the prison population. To this there can be various, not necessarily mutually exclusive, responses. They may range from a flat empirical denial, through arguing that, while this might happen, it can be prevented by sufficient procedural safeguards, to a resigned acceptance of net widening--supported by the proposition that additional sanctions may be necessary to punish offenders whose offenses, while not requiring imprisonment, are too serious to allow them to get away with a mere slap on the wrist. I do not wish to enter this debate directly. Instead I simply postulate that the result of the increased range of sanctions has been that, instead of a simple prison / non-prison dichotomy, modern penal systems subject sentenced offenders to different degrees of loss of freedom.(1) I wish to argue that, if adequately administered and with the necessary legal safeguards in place, these degrees of freedom can be used creatively to change for the better not only prisons but the whole penal system. The Growing Overlap In modern penal systems the degrees by which the freedom of the individual are reduced may range from the extremely limited restrictions of standard probation to incarceration made harsher in the latter instance by internal punishments such as loss of privileges or even solitary confinement. The extent to which these reductions in freedom are imposed directly as a punishment varies, as do the controls on abuse in their imposition and implementation. In these variations lies the true danger of net widening, for it is not always easy to rebut the argument that new penal variations are open to abuse in ways which their predecessors were not. To focus first on imprisonment: I start with a paradox. In most countries the development, for the greatest part of this century at least, has been away from formal variations. Judges generally do not have to choose between types of prison or types of sentences. The old form of imprisonment with hard labor, as opposed to ordinary imprisonment (with ordinary labor), has all but disappeared. The resultant gain in legal clarity has been impressive. Since it has been accepted, in Paterson's well-known adage, that people are sent to prison as punishment not for punishment, it has been possible to recognize, legally at least, that the penal content of imprisonment is the loss of liberty and that the prison regime may not deliberately be organized to be punitive in any other way. This insight provided the basis of the sustained and often successful attack on all compulsory forms of rehabilitation in prison. It also formed the foundation for the assertion that, except for the loss of liberty, prisoners retain all basic rights except those which have necessarily to be restricted to ensure their safe custody. This proposition underlies the attempts to defend the status of prisoners through international minimum standards and prisoners' rights litigation. Of course we are speaking of an ideal, for even in legal form the notion that prisons should be punitive has never disappeared entirely. It has lingered in many ways, not least in the duty to work still imposed in most countries on prisoners. But that duty too is beginning to crumble in the face of the logic of the penal content of the prison sentence--and the practical problem of lack of suitable work.(2) The paradox lies in the fact that, just below the surface of the formally uniform prison sentence, developments, inspired by the ideal that prisons regimes should be relaxed and prisons opened to the outside world, have proceeded apace in the opposite direction. …