Unlikely downsizers : the prison service's role in reversing mass incarceration in Kazakhstan

Since 2000, the prison rate has declined significantly in Kazakhstan. This article demonstrates that the Kazakhstani prison service, counterintuitively, became a key advocate of prison downsizing owing to a coalescence of norms and incentives in the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, the prison service elite maintained the loyalty of rank-and-file personnel through a focus on reform to performative and quantifiable measures of penal performance – such as rankings in the World Prison Brief – while qualitative changes to the service's identity and organization remained unchanged. Prison staff remained militarized and their livelihood and professional culture continued to be independent of the existence of prisons. In conclusion, we argue that the Kazakhstani case demonstrates the need for an integrative theory of penal change that focuses on the interplay of macro-, meso- and micro-level factors in relationally shaping the norms, incentives and opportunities of penal policy actors

Between Convictions and Reconciliations: Processing Criminal Cases in Kazakhstani Courts

Cornell International Law Journal: Vol. 50 : No. 1 , Article 5 The criminal justice system in Kazakhstan is full of contradictions: Soviet-era accusatorial bias in pre-trial detention and sentencing goes hand in hand with the pro-defendant bias in closing criminal cases. This paradoxical co-existence of seemingly contradictory biases fits well within the informal power map of the criminal justice system. The major reform—reducing prison population to decrease recidivism and minimize international shaming—was coupled with the more recent drives for closing cases on the basis of reconciliation, the total registration of crimes, and zero tolerance approach to combating crime have been achieved only through the change of the incentive structure in the criminal justice system. The post-Soviet innovation of closing criminal cases of public prosecution based on the reconciliation with the victim of crime has proliferated in Kazakhstan because this matched both the incentives of the key actors in the criminal justice system and demands from private actors who are involved in criminal proceedings. In contrast, other types of public participation, such as jury trials, which implement the right to a fair trial, give teeth to adversarial proceedings, and cultivate judicial independence—requirements of the Constitution of Kazakhstan—have rarely been used because they disrupt existing power relationships within the law-enforcement system

Legal Reform

ISSN:1863-042

How Federal Is the Russian Federation?

It is undeniably true that in the last 8 years Russian law has experienced an extraordinary period of unification. Whether the Russian Federation (Russia) continues to operate a federal system of government, however, is a question on which reasonable minds differ. On the one hand, its constitution proclaims Russia to be a “federal, rule-of-law” state, divides the country into 83 component states of six different types, and appears to allocate separate spheres of both exclusive and shared jurisdiction to both the central government and to the component states. On the other hand, Russia’s political system has grown increasingly centralized and the actual implementation of the Constitution’s division of jurisdiction between governments has resulted in such an extraordinary degree of central control that the de facto federal nature of the system is thrown into doubt

The Unification of Law in the Russian Federation

How have fluctuating approaches to federalism in post-Soviet Russia affected its legal system? This article examines the core legal subjects, processes,and institutions composing the Russian legal system. The source of legal changes, as Russian federalism has shifted from decentralized beginnings under Yel’tsin to the current centralized system under Medvedev and Putin, is evaluated. Seeds for centralization in the original 1993 Constitution and the roles of “top down,” “bottom up,” and “outside in” pressures to centralize the federal system are examined. The degree of unification and centralization of Russian law and the de facto nature of the legal system are analyzed