Carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12664530
AutoresLaura Piacentini (0000-0003-3817-6012, University of Strathclyde, autor de correspondencia), Elena Katz (University of Oxford)
Año2016
Volumen19
Número2
Páginas221-239
Fecha de publicación2016-08-23
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPunishment & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1462-4745 • E-ISSN: 1741-3095
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1462474516665609
OpenAlexW2513920105
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas24
Referencias citadas31

This paper introduces to punishment and society scholarship a new carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons. Russian imprisonment remains elusive to prison scholars and ethnographers around the world. Moreover, on the subject of prisoners’ rights specifically, the scholarship is dominated by legal discourse. The empirical and theoretical 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

Abolitionism · Criminology · Framing (construction · Gulag · Human rights · Imprisonment · Political science · Politics · Prison · Scholarship · Sociology · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law