Thousands Of Prisoners Research Articles

Perpetrators from Treblinka: interdisciplinary investigations of seven single graves with “Trawniki Men”

At the Treblinka extermination and forced labor camp only a few SS soldiers and around a hundred watchmen kept guard over thousands of prisoners. Despite their lower rank in the Nazi hierarchy than SS soldiers, watchmen were vital to implementing “Operation Reinhard” in the field. Prisoners in Nazi camps were terrified by their brutality and ruthlessness.The guards were intermediaries between the camp’s inmates and the commanding crew, so in cases of a prisoners’ riot, they were the first target. The historical records mention several incidents where the watchmen died at the hands of the captives. However, little is known regarding how the dead bodies of the guards were treated nor what the funeral customs looked like in the camps.In 2019, a row of individual burials was discovered at the former Treblinka extermination and forced labor camp. Seven of those graves were explored to identify the people buried in such an unusual manner and to find out what had caused their deaths. A thorough multidisciplinary study, combining the forensic disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, medicine, and genetics provided the answer.Considering archaeological findings, it can be deduced that the graves belong to the Treblinka guards. The analysis conducted by an anthropologist indicates that the assessed biological profile aligns with the antemortem data of the Treblinka watchmen. Moreover, a study examining perimortem trauma has unveiled that out of the seven men studied, at least two met a violent demise. These findings are crucial in narrowing down the identification process.The results of our study contribute to a general understanding of the funerary customs prevalent in concentration camps worldwide. Prior to this work, there had never been any analysis or publication of the characteristics of watchmen graves at Nazi camps, making our results unique.

PARAMILITARY AND WAR CRIMES COMMITTED IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA / PARAVOJNE JEDINICE I RATNI ZLOČINI POČINJENI U BOSNI I HERCEGOVINI

The last armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which took place between 1992 and 1995, was a bloody one. Not only was lots of real blood were spilled, but metaphorically speaking, it resulted in millions of displaced persons, hundreds of mass graves, hundreds of places of detention, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, hundreds of thousands of tortured and destroyed lives. During the aftermath of the war, around 700 war crime cases were prosecuted, spanning one thousand defendants, and including all possible war crimes, including genocide. These war crime trials could be observed from different perspectives. While most of these crimes were committed by soldiers and police officers, among those who were not soldiers or police officers, one category is to be particularly observed, the paramilitary. Members of the paramilitary, not soldiers or civilians, according to the database of war crimes, were charged in some 5% of all war crimes cases. But then, if these persons are not soldiers or civilians, the question is who were they, and why they do what they did? Furthermore, what interest did they have in behaving in a way that is characterized as criminal, more precisely, a war crime. Among number of the war crimes committed by the paramilitary groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this paper will analyze ones including most serious crimes and those of most significance. By doing that, this paper will contribute to the better understanding of the position and behavior of the paramilitary groups involved in committing war crimes, further legal regulation of their position, and social understanding of the nature of paramilitary forces in and after the armed conflict.

Death and denial of care in Indian prisons.

Custodial death is generally linked in the public mind with police brutality and torture, not with indirect brutality through negligence and callous treatment in jail custody. Yet it is not known how many of the thousands of prisoners who die in our jails every year die due to neglect by the jail authorities. The official Prison Statistics India (PSI) in its most recent report states that 1,879 men and women died due to "natural causes" in prisons across India in 2021. Natural causes are defined in the report as "illness" and "ageing". According to the report, 185 more prisoners died of "unnatural" causes, and 52 of "causes not yet known". [1: p 179]. "Unnatural deaths" include "deaths due to negligence or excesses by jail personnel"a. The vagueness of this classification in the PSI data had been noted by Justice Lokur in a landmark Supreme Court judgment, in 2013, when he said: "The distinction made by the NCRB [National Crime Records Bureau] between natural and unnatural deaths is unclear. For example, if a prisoner dies due to a lack of proper medical attention or timely medical attention, would that be classified as a natural death or an unnatural death?" [2].

The Door Is Still Open

As COVID-19 threatened the lives of those incarcerated, compassionate release motions emerged as a critical mechanism to seek the release of those individuals most vulnerable to severe illness or death. But today, as the urgency of the pandemic diminishes and the grounds justifying release is limited in some Circuits, some may fear that compassionate release has returned to its flawed roots of being available only to a very few. This Article argues that the historical categories related to an individual’s age and health need not, and should not, be so narrowly viewed. Rather, these existing categories for compassionate release can be approached more expansively, by grounding them in an understanding of how an elderly individual’s health deteriorates in prison, and by calling attention to the inability of an incarcerated individual to access specialized and necessary medical care. Framing these categories in this way ultimately encompasses many elderly individuals in prison and those younger individuals with serious medical conditions who are receiving inadequate medical care. Given the rapidly aging federal prison population and the thousands of prisoners who suffer from significant medical conditions, many of whom have already served many years in prison and demonstrate compelling rehabilitation, these categories remain viable—and even promising— avenues for release.

Prisoner Voting in the United Kingdom: An Empirical Study of a Contested Prisoner Right

Do prisoners’ rights matter? This paper examines this question through a social‐legal study of one of the most controversial prisoners’ rights issues of recent decades: prisoner voting. Thousands of prisoners are legally eligible to vote in the United Kingdom. Drawing on a survey of 134 electoral administrators, we explore whether they are exercising that right and the potential barriers to electoral participation which they face. We find that participation among eligible prisoners is extremely low. Further, we identify problems in the administration of prisoner voting rights which may prevent eligible prisoners from voting. In light of these findings, we argue that the scale of prisoner disenfranchisement is likely to be graver than previously thought and open to future legal challenge. The prisoner voting example provides a cautionary tale of the limitations of prisoner rights, both as a measure of existing prison conditions and as tools for transforming them.

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Policing Criminological Knowledge on Imprisonment in Pandemic Times: Confronting Opacity and Navigating Corporatization in Prison Research

Thousands of prisoners and prison staff have been infected by COVID-19 across Canada. Deteriorating conditions of confinement have become commonplace, with segregation-like measures imposed in the name of preventing COVID-19 transmission. While prisoners, their loved ones, advocates, and researchers have discussed trends regarding infection, public health restrictions, and even vaccination behind bars, less explored is the deterioration of government transparency related to incarceration during this pandemic. Engaging with literatures on the policing of criminological knowledge, access to information, and state corporatization, this article examines how Canadian government authorities have limited access to records about imprisonment during the pandemic. We examine how the recent centralization of freedom of information request processing, which reshapes government services to mirror corporate entities, has altered what can be known about penitentiary, prison, and jail policies, practices, and outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the need for social science researchers to contest information blockades and create pathways to promote state transparency.

NKVD Industrial Engineering in the Kola North in the Late 1930s – Early 1940s

Introduction. On the territory of the Kola North, the prisoners carried out hydraulic construction, and mining enterprises were built. An analysis of the NKVD industrial construction sector’s functioning in the designated time and regional dimension allows a deeper understanding of the role of the GULAG in the industrialization of a particular region, the country as a whole, contributes to the further development of scientific ideas about the NKVD’s mobilization potential in the prewar period. The purpose of this study is to analyze the construction activities of the GULAG camps in the Kola North in the context of the mobilization practice of the NKVD in the prewar years. Materials and Methods. The source foundation of the study was a set of materials from both central and regional archives. Analyzing the processes took place in the regional sector of the industrial construction of the NKVD at the turn of the 1930s – 1940s, the author used dialectical, systemic approaches, comparative and statistical research methods. Results. At the turn of the 1930s – 1940s, in the territory of the Kola North, the construction activities of the NKVD were of a large-scale nature and were of military-strategic importance for the country. There was a goal given to the department to speed up the completion of important construction objects. At the same time, a whole range of problems characterizing the GULAG economy characterized the construction sector of the NKVD: a poor supply of machines and mechanisms, materials, and a lack of project documentation. These circumstances systematically led to the disruption of planned targets. In addition, construction labor camps, despite the growth in the number of special contingents, experienced a permanent shortage of labor, the cause of which was a large proportion of disabled prisoners and chronically ill, unfit for work, as well as disabled, sick prisoners. Significant losses of labor force in forced labor camps were the result of serious problems associated with the organization of labor processes. Construction management delayed the conclusion of contracts with ITL forced labor camps on the provision of labor. A significant part of the prisoners was not taken to work due to the failure to provide an escort, the lack of clothes and shoes, downtime at work due to the lack of building materials. Discussion and Conclusion. An analysis of the construction activities of the NKVD in the Kola North, the economy of the GULAG, as a whole, helps to identify and specify the problem of the safety of resources at the disposal of labor camps, the inability of the latter to ensure the economic use of thousands of prisoners. This circumstance significantly limited the mobilization capabilities of the NKVD, including in the process of implementing large industrial projects of military strategic importance for the country. The economic consequences of resource losses (an increase of production cost, work in general, a decrease in the balance of working time, etc.) largely determine the place of the GULAG in the economic history of the country.

EXPOSED

This hybrid paper/artist presentation is focused on the interactive documentary EXPOSED [https://unjustlyexposed.com], which provides a cumulative public record and evolving history of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on incarcerated people. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19 over time, inside prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US, from the perspective of prisoners and their families. Original interviews combined with quotes, audio clips and statistics, collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. EXPOSED launched on October 30, 2020. It will be updated weekly until December 30, 2021. The scale of the project is intended to reflect the scale of the crisis. On September 1, 2021, there were well over ten thousand quotes, statistics, and audio clips in the project database. On July 8th alone, the timeline includes over 100 statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and neglect. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, signal that the injustices they endure are structural, and demonstrate that the criminal punishment system in the US, itself, constitutes a public health crisis.

POW Camp in Jindřichovice: Founding, Everyday Life, Memorialization

The prisoner of war camp in Jindřichovice (German: Heinrichsgrün), located in the Ore Mountains on the territory of the modern Czech Republic, was one of the largest such camps of the First World War in Austria-Hungary. In the period from 1915 to 1918, tens of thousands of prisoners of war from Serbia, Montenegro, the Russian Empire, and Italy passed through it. Many Serbian civilians were interned in addition to military personnel. Over 170 buildings were erected for the camp which was capable of accommodating almost forty thousand prisoners and which was surrounded by a fence with barbed wire and watchtowers. The whole complex was almost autonomous, with all the necessary infrastructure, including a bakery, hospital, laundry, ablutions, and a chapel. Prisoners of war were used in a variety of jobs in the vicinity, primarily related to agriculture. Their labour was also used for the repair of roads, the extraction of basalt in a nearby quarry, and in industry, primarily at a metallurgical plant in Rotava and in the construction of a chemical plant in Sokolov (at that time Falknov; German: Falkenau). From 1917, the situation with the provision of food and medicine began to worsen in the camp, leading to the spread of disease and a rapid increase in the mortality rate. In total, 3,855 people died here, including 2,465 Serbs and Montenegrins, 1,301 Italians, 56 Russians, and approximately two dozen of the Austro-Hungarian camp guards, among whom were several Czechs. The prisoners of war were buried in a cemetery near the camp, which has survived to this day. After the war, the remains of the Serbian prisoners were exhumed and, together with the remains of thousands of soldiers of the newly established Yugoslavia who had previously been buried in locations all over Bohemia, were transferred to a mausoleum, which was converted from the camp’s water supply cistern. Today, it contains the remains of about 7,190 of those who came from the territory of the former Yugoslavia — mostly Serbs, but also soldiers who fought in the war on the side of Austria-Hungary, primarily Slovenes, Croats, and Bosnians, and also 189 Russians.

"La representación de la experiencia del cautiverio a través de la confrontación / correlación simbólica entre espacio público y privado en 'Frazadas del Estadio Nacional' de Jorge Montealegre"

Making memory through writing, that is, recomposing one's own personal experience as a victim of state terrorism in many Latin American countries through its literary representation, entails, among many other consequences, considering places and objects, normally belonging to different semantic spheres, within the optic of violence and disappearance. In 2003, Jorge Montealegre published the novel-testimony Frazadas del Estadio Nacional, in which he reconstructs the months spent in captivity, from the first days of Pinochet's coup, in September 28th, 1973, in the National Stadium in Santiago, together with thousands of prisoners, until November of the same year, when the writer was transferred to another clandestine centre, Chacabuco, and then expelled from the country in July 1974. Right from the title, Montealegre's work attributes a connotative value to a public sporting space – the National Stadium – and to an everyday, familiar object – the blanket – in addition to their ordinary significance, turning them into symbols of the traumatic experience of the condition of detainees in clandestine concentration camps. The process of conversion of these two terms, reiterated within the pages of the novel, into signs of identification of the symbolic space of the testimonial discourse is the subject of my intervention.

Pandemic sentence remissions: a model for executive decarceration during and following COVID-19

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, prisoners around the world have been released from custody as a result of generally applicable government policies or individualised administrative decisions. This has brought to light the ways in which the Executive may, consistently with historical practice and contemporary exigencies, alter the effect of sentences imposed by the judiciary. In this comment, the author argues that this phenomenon also has implications for those prisoners who have not been released during the pandemic. Taking Australia as the immediate site for his intervention, Murphy argues that – under existing legislation – thousands of prisoners may now be eligible for sentence remissions to account for the especially onerous conditions of imprisonment during the pandemic. Many aspects of this proposal are modest, especially its framing within current doctrine. Yet the modesty of the proposal serves to uncover a middle ground for the meeting of criminal justice traditionalists and advocates of decarceration. Meaningful, if provisional, compromise on decarceration may be closer than we think.

TRANSIT PRISON № 25 IN LVIV (1944–1955): HISTORY, MEMORY, MEMORIALIZATION

Summary. The purpose of this research is to present on the basis of archival sources, memoirs, and oral history testimonies the history of the largest transit prison in post-war Ukraine, to study the memory and the state of its memorialization in Lviv urban space. The scientific novelty of the article implies that for the first time different aspects of the prison are revealed in Ukrainian historiography. They include, in particular, the penitentiary regime and space, the composition of the prisoner contingent, resistance and escapes from the prison, the operation of the transit point, as well as conditions of the transportation of convicts to GULAG camps. Conclusions. Transit prison № 25 in Lviv was one of the central cites of Soviet mass violence in Lviv and the largest institution of such type in the Ukrainian SSR. Through its example one can realize how Nazi and Soviet violence intersected in an urban space where both systems often used the same premises and objects to isolate their victims. For many thousands of prisoners, the Lviv transit prison became an intermediate station/a transit point on the way from pre-trial detention to GULAG camps. It also served as a meeting point for inmates from Western Ukraine and Central Eastern European countries occupied by the Red Army. At different times, criminal and political prisoners, foremost members of the Ukrainian and Polish underground, were kept here. Despite conflicting political views, it was the pursuance of common interests of survival and resistance against the brutality of the prison administration and criminals that drew Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners together behind bars. Families of those repressed, including women and children, even babies, were kept in prison. This fact highlights "the family hostage taking" practice used by Soviet authorities against "enemies of the people" in Stalin՚s period. Between 1949 and 1950, the prison in parallel served as an integral part of the Soviet infrastructure of mass deportations, which affected families of members and sympathisers of the Ukrainian nationalist underground, wealthy farmers, and Greek-Catholic clergy in Western Ukraine. Due to the lack of documentary sources, it is nowadays impossible to establish even an approximate number of people who passed through the Lviv transit prison. The inmates՚ memory of their prison experience is ambiguous. Some recall the transit prison as a site of endless suffering and destitute, while others describe it as "the less evil" and some relief in comparison with pre-trial detention facilities run by the NKVD-MGB. Proper memorization of the site of the former transit prison in Lviv urban space has just started. This task is being performed by the Memorial Museum of "Territory of Terror", which has been created in this place.

Makun (Don’t Cry): recreating vetoed realities through the animated documentary and animated journalism

<p><em>MAKUN (NO LLORES) - Dibujos en un C.I.E. </em>es un documental animado de 30 minutos que se adentra en una realidad muy opaca: los centros de internamiento de extranjeros (CIEs), cárceles para personas inocentes en los que normalmente no están permitidas las cámaras de vídeo. Habiendo conseguido un material documental único —los dibujos dejados en las paredes del CIE de Fuerteventura por miles de presos— sobre un tema que nos interesaba, decidimos dar vida al mismo por medio de la animación, confiando en conseguir algo más que la mera ilustración de los testimonios orales recogidos para la película. En el presente artículo, el director de la película, Emilio Martí, resume de manera personal la experiencia de abordar la preparación y rodaje de <em>MAKUN</em>, así como algunos aspectos de su distribución.</p>

A spectacular attempt to release Mandela from prison under the Apartheid regime1

ABSTRACT During the period when the ANC operative Nelson Mandela was incarcerated, there were not only verbal calls from other countries for the release of the world’s best-known political prisoner; at the very latest since Mikhail Gorbatchev proposed an end to the Cold War in the Soviet Union, there was at least one definite and direct attempt to release him. One of the conceptionally most advanced plans was that of the East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel. Having been appointed by the GDR’s head of state, Erich Honecker, as Personal Representative for Humanitarian Affairs, he had already arbitrated the exchange of roughly 150 captured spies from 23 countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain; he had also organised the release of tens of thousands of prisoners. The plan was to exchange Nelson Mandela for the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, or to include him in a large-scale international exchange of political prisoners and agents. It was for this reason that Wolfgang Vogel visited South Africa in March 1986, one of only a few GDR citizens to do so, to effect the release of Mandela – and failed.

COVID-19 response in the Middle East and north Africa: challenges and paths forward

COVID-19 response in the Middle East and north Africa: challenges and paths forward

Living By Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons

Contrary to popular opinion, Civil War battles were not always formal military engagements or guerilla skirmishes between Confederate and U.S. forces. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war (POWs) knew that their battles were starkly different from armed conflicts. POWs understood that fights in captivity occurred against their enemies, themselves, elements, animals, insects, and diseases. We know an extensive amount of information about infamous prison camps, including Andersonville and Elmira. Recent scholarship has brought to light the complexity of pardoning and surrendering processes and the "black flag" policy's racial politics. However, the day-to-day lived experiences of imprisoned soldiers and their struggles for survival are regularly portrayed in cliché terms. In Living By Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons, Evan A. Kutzler argues that rather than view POWs through a stereotypical lens, we must understand the complicated lives of captives in more concrete ways.

Issue of taking prisoners, placement and registration of German and Austro- Hungarian prisoners of war in Ukrainian territories during the First World War

In this article, the author studied the issue of taking prisoners of war by the Russian army payingspecial attention to international agreements regulating this process signed by the Government of theRussian Empire and regulatory documents in the form of regulations and instructions, which did not alwayscomply with these international agreements. The author also emphasizes the fact that the process of takingGerman and Austrian-Hungarian prisoners of war by soldiers of the Russian Empire did not always complywith these instructions and provisions.For example, according to international agreements signed by thegovernment of the Russian Empire, a prisoner of war had to state only his name and rank. However,according to the regulatory documents regulating the prisoners of war interrogation issue, approved by thesame government, he had to answer a number of questions relating the information on his military unit,the state of the enemy army, and the information the enemy was aware of on the Russian army. In addition,the author gives an example of certain military units, which did not even try to comply with regulatorydocuments, treated the prisoners of war very cruelly, and sometimes even executed them.The author considers the issue of placement of prisoners of war in the territory of the Russian Empire,which highlights the plans of the Government of the Russian Empire regarding this issue, and gives a numberof objective reasons preventing the implementation of these plans. Taking into account the regulatorydocuments and recollections of eyewitnesses, he analyzes the procedure for the transfer of prisoners of warfrom the moment of their capture to the places of their detention.On the ground of the provisions on prisonersof war, he characterizes the standards of their living arrangements and describes the way these were put intolife, focusing his attention on their stay in Ukrainian territories. The author comes to the conclusion thatprisoners’ of war living arrangements did not always meet the established norms. They were very differentdepending on where the prisoners of war were.Their living conditions in the military units differed fromthe living conditions in the prisoners’ camps or the places of their labor exploitation.Also, sometimestheir living arrangements varied depending on which nationality a prisoner of war was. Therefore, livingarrangements were better for the Slavic prisoners of war than for the Germans or the Hungarians. A part ofthe prisoners of war was transferred to the private parties for assistance in housekeeping. There were evencases when such prisoners of war, getting to the widows’ households, started living together as spouses.The author examines the structure of the institutions and organizations of the Russian Empire, whichwere supposed to keep records of prisoners of war, and gives reasons why these records were not aseffective as it was expected and dozens of thousands of prisoners of war were lost in the expanses of theRussian Empire.

12. La Lager-SS

This article gives an overview of the two main groups of perpetrators who were used in the concentration camps under the control of the “Concentration Camps Inspectorate”: the guard force and the concentration camp SS. Questions concerning organisation and structure, social profile and mentality are the focal point of consideration. While the composition of the camp guard force consisting of several tens of thousands of people changed drastically, especially during the war, the concentration camp SS was a small group of around 320 SS leaders, who were at the top of the various departments of the concentration camp command squads. These men were permanently in the concentration camps and can be regarded as the main group responsible for concentration camp terror, as the Nazis’ functional elite. At the centre of the investigation of this group are questions as to generational affiliation, social origin, functional socialisation and mentality as well as their common activity in the concentration camps, which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.

Extraterritorial Punishment

Repatriation treaties permit noncitizens convicted of crimes in the United States to serve their sentences abroad. The reach of these treaties is vast: together, they provide for the transfer of tens of thousands of prisoners in American custody. In practice, however, repatriation is remarkably rare. This is not because people want to stay in American prisons. Instead, the critical feature of repatriation is resistance from prison bureaucrats, who often determine that prisoners are “too American,” or that their crimes are too severe, to license punishment in a foreign jurisdiction. This Article examines bureaucratic resistance to repatriation. Drawing on doctrine, legislative history, statistics, and prison policies, I argue that prison officials’ reluctance to repatriate prisoners stems from a conflict between two theories of punishment: one in which the criminal sanction binds a person to the place whose laws he has offended, and one in which the location of punishment is severed from the authority to punish. Ultimately, resistance to repatriation reflects a concern about the legitimacy of extraterritorial punishment. Whether or not that concern should change repatriation law, its existence highlights a growing gap between the legal justifications for imprisonment and the actual practice of punishing people in the United States.