The virtual reality of Russian prisons : the impact of social media on prisoner agency and prison structure in Russian prisons

Prison agencies around the world are reporting a rise in the use of illicit communication devices in prison. Nevertheless, there is very little prison sociological research into how prisoners themselves communicate online. Using Russia as a case study, this paper reports findings from new research on how prisoners are engaging with the internet and the effects of this on prisoner agency and prison structure. Our main finding is that Russian penality sits at the nexus of two processes. First, it is de-institutionalised in that the prison, discursively speaking, is no longer fixed to a built form. Second, it is reflexively re-territorialised in that it places prisoner agency onto a third space. The paper presents a new conceptual framework of ‘prisoners as absent’, which reflects penality in Russia as culturally contingent and politically resilient. The interplay between de-institutionalisation and re-territorialisation has produced on a new penal imaginary - a carceral motif for the twenty first century - in the form of a virtual world

Carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons

This paper introduces to punishment and society scholarship a new carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons. Russian imprisonment remains elusive to prisons 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

Architecture and attachment : carceral collectivism and the problem of prison reform in Russia and Georgia

This article looks at the trajectory of prison reform in post-Soviet Georgia and Russia. It attempts to understand recent developments through an analysis of the resilient legacies of the culture of punishment born out of the Soviet period. To do this, the article fleshes out the concept of carceral collectivism, which refers to the practices and beliefs that made up prison life in Soviet and now post-Soviet countries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 revealed a penal culture in notable need of reform. Less obvious, in retrospect, was how over the course of a century this predominantly ‘collectivist’ culture of punishment was instantiated in routine penal practices that stand in opposition to western penalities. The article shows how the social and physical structuring of collectivism and penal self-governance have remained resilient in the post-Soviet period despite diverging attempts at reform in Russia and Georgia. The article argues that persistent architectural forms and cultural attachment to collectivism constitute this resilience. Finally, the article asks how studies of collectivist punishment in the post-Soviet region might inform emerging debates about the reform and restructuring of individualizing, cell-based prisons in western jurisdictions

Human rights in Russia in the shadow of the gulag : penal transitology as bureaucratic drama

In this paper, I develop a new theoretical framework that brings offers a muti-disciplinary approach (history, criminology, sociology, and political science) to better understand Russian penal development since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The new theoretical framework, penal transitology, aims to locate a significant time of penal change in diverse, and disputative, external compliance-building and bureaucratic regimes. I argue that due to transnational regulation dominating post-Soviet imprisonment, the penal system operates in a state of constant institutional risk and regulation. This transnational milieu is one where shaming strategies have created new sociological contexts for thinking critically about penal reform. Those contexts concern the extent to which European institutions and legal and powerful NGO regulation have produced and embedded compliance regimes that have the effect (intended or otherwise) of erasing discourse on the role of the prison in state-society relations

"Get in, get out, go back?" : transitioning from prison ethnography to prison policy research in Russia

Prisons are unpredictable worlds that exist in time and in space. They are institutions people ‘go to’ acting as both a product and a generator of society’s lost trust in acts of malevolence, crime and re-offending (Wacquant, 2002). Prisons have endured for centuries and consequently, the arrangement of people, activities and buildings are deeply implicated in a power-knowledge couplet (see Foucault, 1980) where phenomena, events and structures of history are registered and dispersed. Indeed the prison is one of very few institutions where pain, suffering and power are depressed into the entire infrastructure and social fabric. In my ethnographic work a combination of sheer curiosity that Russia remains an uncharted penal territory for Western scholars, coupled with a long-standing personal interest in the region that extended to mastering the language, made the site one of rich and potent allure. What I have learned about all prisons - from doing prison research in Russia - is that ‘the place’ (jurisdiction) and the ‘the site’ (the prison) are the repositories of a unique cultural relationship: the relationship between the prison and the state is a clear mirror reflection of the relationship between the person and the state. Thus, the prison reveals the state, which is why prisons are such unique sites of sociological inquiry. In my chapter I will do two things. First, I will reflect on almost twenty years of doing ethnography in Russian prisons. What I hope to achieve is a better understanding of the totality of the physical, emotional and intellectual challenges of researching a hidden penal system such as Russia’s; one which looms large and vast across the European sphere and which weighs heavily in the histories of incarceration in high punishment societies. My own prison research journey is one in which the historical and cultural registers of incarceration can be understood as ruptured, contingent and in a state of cultural to-ing and fro-ing

The use of inhaled corticosteroid in preschool wheezers: what's the point today?

Among the preschool children who wheeze two different groups can be identify: children who have a viral infection and those who respond to multiple triggers, such as exercise or allergens

East is East? Beyond the Global North and Global South in criminology

This paper identifies an absence in currently constituted criminological discourse on the Global North and Global South. This absence is the Global East. The Global East is not a defined region but a relation of betweenness, geographically and geo-politically, within and between the South and North, representing peoples from countries and societies which fit imperfectly into a North/South binary. We focus on the Eastern European and Eurasian regions to demonstrate this point, concentrating specifically on its omission in punishment and society studies. Our paper makes a positive argument for the Global East concept, disrupting the assumed categories of North and South and producing a strategic essentialism to help better represent peoples thus far overlooked in southern criminology

Structured Light Plethysmography (SLP): Management and follow up of a paediatric patient with pneumonia

Structured Light Plethysmography (SLP) is a non-invasive method to study chest and abdominal movement during breathing and can identify abnormal contributions of the different regions of the chest. M.D hospitalized for pneumonia, underwent SLP and spirometry at admission (T0), after 48 hours (T1), and after one month (T2). SLP parameters showed expiratory flow limitation, information consistent with the spirometric parameters collected, and reduced motion in the area effected by pneumonia, with improvement and normalization at T1 and T2. This method gave useful information about the contribution to the respiratory movement of the lung area affected by pneumonia so we can speculate a possible use in the follow-up of children affected by pneumonia or other respiratory diseases, and who are not able to perform a spirometric test

Heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1) is associated with induced gene expression in Drosophila euchromatin

Heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1) is a conserved nonhistone chromosomal protein, which is involved in heterochromatin formation and gene silencing in many organisms. In addition, it has been shown that HP1 is also involved in telomere capping in Drosophila. Here, we show a novel striking feature of this protein demonstrating its involvement in the activation of several euchromatic genes in Drosophila. By immunostaining experiments using an HP1 antibody, we found that HP1 is associated with developmental and heat shock–induced puffs on polytene chromosomes. Because the puffs are the cytological phenotype of intense gene activity, we did a detailed analysis of the heat shock–induced expression of the HSP70 encoding gene in larvae with different doses of HP1 and found that HP1 is positively involved in Hsp70 gene activity. These data significantly broaden the current views of the roles of HP1 in vivo by demonstrating that this protein has multifunctional roles

Employment and Employability in Scottish Prisons : A Research Briefing Paper

This research briefing paper provides an analysis of the limited research into employment and employability in prisons research. It was produced by Piacentini, Weaver and Jardine to inform discussions at an event held at the University of Strathclyde on 19th February, 2018. The event brought experts in penal policy, employment law and business together to consider the kinds of legislative and policy reform that can better enable or encourage the intended or hoped for outcomes underpinning work in prisons in Scotland. Our plenary speakers were Teresa Medhurst, Director of Strategy, The Scottish Prison Service; Professor Douglas Brodie, Associate Principal and Executive Dean, University of Strathclyde and Professor of Employment Law; and Matt Fountain, CEO of Freedom Bakery. We were joined by practitioners and experts working to improve people’s experiences of and opportunities for employment both during custody and upon release. In contributing to this conversation, this paper asks four key questions: Why does employment and employability in matter? Where have we got to so far? What could we do differently? and, How do we get there? or, as part of that – What questions should we be asking