Carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516665609 |
| Author | Elena Katz,Laura Piacentini |
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
2017, Vol. 19(2) 221–239
! The Author(s) 2016
Carceral framing
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
of human rights
DOI: 10.1177/1462474516665609
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
in Russian prisons
Laura Piacentini
University of Strathclyde, Scotland
Elena Katz
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
This paper introduces to punishment and society scholarship a new carceral framing of
human rights in Russian prisons. Russian imprisonment remains elusive to prison scho-
lars and ethnographers around the world. Moreover, on the subject of prisoners’ rights
specifically, the scholarship is dominated by legal discourse. The empirical and theoret-
ical scholarship that has developed over the last twenty years has argued that Russian
imprisonment is exceptional in the study of world penal systems with the research
seeking to gain a sense of this exceptionality through looking at the inertial legacies of
Gulag penal culture on present day punishment forms. This article attempts to challenge
this claim and will argue that specifically in the area of human rights, Russia has followed
a not dissimilar carceral formation to Western prisons. Through an interrogation of the
cultural, political and historical factors underpinning how rights are framed in Russian
prisons the article suggests that human rights are operationalised as a lever for legal and
penal control. This is a significant new finding in the study of Russian imprisonment
because of the questions that arise around penal resilience, how rights and penal power
develop through discourse and how global penal norms converge across jurisdictions.
Keywords
carceral, European, framing, human rights, pravosoznaniye, prisons, Russian
Corresponding author:
Laura Piacentini, The School of Social Work and Social Policy, University of Strathclyde, Lord Hope Building,
141 St James Road, Glasgow G4 0LT, Scotland.
Email: laura.piacentini@strath.ac.uk
222
Punishment & Society 19(2)
Introduction
Campaigns for prisoners’ human rights are symbolic and expansive in their efforts
to challenge prison standards, administrative decisions and legal rules. Human
rights in prisons are debated from multiple standpoints and framed differently to
include: their legal status and effects on law (Daems, 2011; Van Zyl Smit and
Snacken, 2013), their framing as part of a struggle for equality and fairness
(Morrison, 2010) and their dominant influence in societies formerly marked by
atrocity and the absence of the rule of law (Jefferson and Gaborit, 2015;
McEvoy, 2003).1 While all prison regimes differ in their cultural specificities,
rules, laws, infrastructure and norms, it is through the diffusion of human rights
law into international human rights obligations, trickling down to domestic laws,
national prison service policies outlining fair and transparent decision-making,
where legal links and obligations between penal systems are made (Rubin, 2015).
This article is concerned with how rights discourse is diffused and framed by
internal and external actors in prisons in Russian prisons. Following the exposure
of widespread penal aberrations after the collapse of the USSR, human rights have
been unequivocally embraced and absorbed into law, policy and practice with
positive effects that include a recognition that all prisoners have rights (albeit
applied with varying competency) (see Bowring, 2013; Piacentini, 2004).
Furthermore, prisoners’ rights have evolved in an ambitious legal-penal reform
context that is measured globally against the country’s transition from the Soviet
penal system. Human rights have brought Russia closer politically, culturally and –
crucially – penologically to its European neighbours through, among other things,
Russia joining the Council of Europe in 1996; an enactment that brought the
institutions of prisons and criminal justice into alignment. Consequently, for
twenty-five years, penal reform in Russian prisons has been constructed almost
entirely from legal discourse. However, when prisoners’ rights are constructed as
entitlements overseen by law, this raises the matter of how those held in prison get
caught up in the powerful cross-current of rights and penal power. A question that
comes to mind is how do prisoners themselves conceptualise their own rights?
Secondly, what does rights discourse tell us about the prison as an object of
study, its culture, practices and purpose? These are significant sociological ques-
tions practically and theoretically for the study of Russian prisons: first in further-
ing our understanding of the role of human rights in improving correctional
practices in an era of mass incarceration and, secondly, because interpretations
of rights can lead to actors ‘framing’ punishment in a particular way.
An important issue to acknowledge here is that while research into prisoners’
rights is almost absent from prison sociology everywhere, by contrast, law scholars
and law organisations have been talking about prisoners’ rights for decades.2 As
Calavita and Jenness note, the extensive law literature serves as a reminder that,
‘. . . while law in everyday life is salient but largely subterranean, in prison it is
emblazoned across the landscape’ (Calavita and Jenness, 2015: 73). Part of the
explanation for the dominance of legal scholarship on the subject of prisoners’
rights lies in the need (following the atrocities of the Second World War) to
Piacentini and Katz
223
integrate a very broad principle of human rights law into all places of detention
(Coyle, 2009). Other explanations include: increasing awareness of the risk to the
abuse of power in prisons, perceptions that legal doctrine is the most informed and
accurate authority on the subject of rights (see Valverde et al., 2005) and because
law governs all aspects of prisoners’ behaviour.3 It has also been argued that the
legal empowerment of prisoners has coincided with a harsher penal climate, esca-
lating imprisonment rates (the US leads the world on prison population rates with
2.3 million prisoners held across the criminal justice system),4 increased prison
building and risk management (see Hannah-Moffat, 2001; Hoffman, 2011). With
reference to Canadian prisons, Hannah-Moffat (2001; 2004) argues further that the
carceral-legal framing of rights disguises punishment and may even enhance penal
power. This is because rights discourse is part of penal governmentality that: leaves
the institutional dynamics of incarceration intact (through a focus on transforming
prisoners into self-governing bodies), makes prisoners feel that they are to blame
for their personal circumstances (which puts them at risk of being stigmatized as a
trouble-maker) and produces specific tensions between power and vulnerability
(which can affect a prisoner’s self-identity as an agent with or without rights).
The effect of this is that understandings of how rights come to be spatially and
temporally organised, and culturally and politically framed, remains hidden
(Murphy and Whitty, 2013). Moreover, the institutional and cultural power of
imprisonment is structurally framed in ways that can override rights claims
(Calavita and Jenness, 2015). A human rights lens, therefore, can be valuable for
interrogating questions around the cultural meaning of human rights in prisons,
penal exceptionality and the question of commonality between punishment sys-
tems. Few Western sociologists have explored these questions in depth but some
scholars are analysing carefully the sociological intersections between prison as a
place of legal rights and penal power (see Calavita and Jenness, 2015; Hannah-
Moffat, 2001; Jefferson and Gaborit, 2015).
Our article is informed by this work but we do not focus on legality and penal
power and, instead, we argue that the varying ways that discourses around rights
are framed are very important because they reveal socio-political and cultural
insights into what compliance might mean in a country such as Russia with clear
implications for how and why rights are promoted internally and externally. The
paper is drawn from a new project – the first of its kind in world prison sociology –
that explores how Russian prisoners develop rights consciousness through a range
of remedies (online platforms, legal aid and accessing civil society groups). The
patterns of how prisoners conceptualise rights and how this then shapes under-
standings about prison as a place of law, punishment and stigmatization will be
explored in a forthcoming book by the authors. In this paper we present an analysis
of Russian language research on human rights in prisons alongside a discussion of
the European legal and policy discourse. Our analysis of the literature shows that
human rights engagement in Russian prisons emerges out of a nexus of discursive
frames embedded in socio-political, historical, cultural and (geo) political condi-
tions which we argue are essential to a discussion on prisoners rights (see Garland,
224
Punishment & Society 19(2)
2006). We employ two ‘carceral frames’ that offer a more nuanced approach for
interrogating rights in Russian prisons. We find Goffman’s (1974) concept of
‘frames’ particularly instructive because human rights is effecting specific outcomes.
Each frame has ‘speech actors’ and different audiences. The first frame we term
‘European penal harmonisation’ and it concerns European penal policy that articu-
lates human rights to Russian political officialdom through a more macro compli-
ance context.5 For our second frame we use...
To continue reading
Request your trial