ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 presented a theoretical vocabulary that revealed variations in how the prison world was read and then administered that I subsumed under three main headings. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, severe human rights abuses were exposed and there was uncertainty over what kind of prison system was likely to emerge in the future. On the threshold of yet another century, prisons in Russia appeared entrenched in polarised versions of rehabilitation arising from different ways of conceiving the individual (one focusing on the self, the other on social citizenship). This was the period when Russian prisons corresponded to a discipline model. How the prison system set about modernisation paved the way for an inevitable third stage. The argument that I introduced in Chapter 5 is that local penal sensibilities are passed over in favour of importing Western approaches of a specific kind: universal human rights. This development reflects changes in the international environment where global forces are determining the fate of national states due to more open economies (including Russia's) (Esping-Anderson 1998). However, the erosion of national sensibilities should not be exaggerated. One of most powerful conclusions arising from penal reform in Russia is that consensus-building has improved the situation on the ground (see also Coyle 2002). But there remains a huge discrepancy between existing modes of governance and universal demands for homogeneity over what constitutes ‘humane punishment’.
