JAILBREAK

After 70 Years, Russia Is Ready To Concede Its Tough-on-crime Experiment Is
A Costly, Merciless Failure

Maxim Maslov stands on the bank of St. Petersburg's famous River Neva, but
his back is turned to the water and the grand historical buildings that
line the far shore. Instead, he stares intently across a busy four-lane
highway to a tiny window in the massive prison known as Kresty.

A pole pokes through the window -- a blowgun made from rolled newspapers
and tape. A dart sails 40 metres, landing at the highway's edge. Maslov
lunges into the roaring traffic, snatches up the dart and jumps back to the
curb. The dart, also made of coiled newspaper, has a hollow shaft from
which Maslov plucks a tightly curled piece of paper. He eagerly reads the
tiny note.

For the prisoners of Kresty, Russia's largest prison, this is the best way
to send an uncensored message from their dank cells to the outside world.
People can always be found milling along the riverbank, waiting for an
illicit message from friends or family inside. Sometimes the crowds spill
onto the highway. Sometimes, as now, there is only a handful of anxious
visitors standing in the filthy slush.

Maslov's note is from a former cellmate. "I did time here," he says, "so I
have friends inside."

One might think that Maslov, 27, had served a sentence in Kresty. But the
czarist-era prison is only a pre-trial detention centre, holding prisoners
awaiting trial or sentencing. Maslov was held on theft charges in its
squalid cells for 21 months before a judge threw out his case. Although
never convicted, he served the equivalent of a long prison sentence in
cells so crowded, dirty and disease-ridden they would be deemed illegal in
any western country.

Far from an aberration, Maslov's experience is common. The Russian system
is glutted. There are simply too many bodies to be processed. Courts
stagger under impossible dockets; prosecutors struggle with overwhelming
caseloads; prison cells designed for two hold 12, breeding despair,
violence and plagues.

The crisis has been decades in the making. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union
became the first country to implement the criminal justice policies that
today in North America are marketed under the slogan "tough on crime." Such
policies -- based on the belief that the best way to reduce crime is to
lock up more criminals in harsher prisons -- were the main reason the
Soviet Union's imprisonment rate was for decades the highest in the world.

That lead, however, has been challenged during the past 10 years by the
United States, which has sent its own prison population soaring by
implementing many of the same "tough on crime" policies that had been
pioneered by the former Soviet Union (and supported in Canada by, among
others, Ontario's Conservative government and the Canadian Alliance party).
It's a macabre parallel of the Cold War arms race -- an "incarceration
race." As with the arms race, the United States is on top, having recently
edged past Russia to boast the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

International races -- whether of arms or prisons -- are expensive. The
U.S. beat the Soviet Union in the arms race because, unlike the communists,
it could afford to keep paying. The same is happening in the imprisonment
race. The United States can afford new prisons, courtrooms, judges,
prosecutors and police; Russia cannot. By maintaining a massive prison
population, Russia has produced the kind of injustices suffered by Maslov
and the prisoners locked in Kresty.

Today in Russia, every fourth male has been imprisoned at some time in his
life. The cost is incalculable. So, too, are the years of liberty lost, or
the number of families broken, to say nothing of the sheer degradation
inflicted on those forced to live in Soviet and Russian prisons. Whatever
the sum of these costs, Russia has borne them for nothing: The country's
justice policies have never proved to be effective in reducing crime,
either in Soviet times or in today's crime-ridden Russia.

With the evidence of failure all around them, many Russian officials have
decided to concede the incarceration race to the United States.

In 1999, the Russian government granted amnesty to 100,000 prisoners, the
most dramatic evidence of a desire for change; an even bigger amnesty, of
perhaps one-third of Russia's one million prisoners, has been considered.
The goal, said Justice Minister Yuri Chaika in announcing the second plan,
is "to introduce more humane methods of criminal prosecution and punishment
for crimes."

The Russian reformers' ideal is Western Europe, where prison is used
sparingly and the American tough-on-crime model is considered barbaric. If
meaningful change does come, it will be an historic moment in criminal
justice: After 70 years, Russia will be declaring its own invention a
terrible failure.

The symbol of that failure squats, gothic and sullen, on the banks of the
Neva. Kresty prison is formed by two complexes, each with a central rotunda
and four attached cell blocks, a classic 19th-century prison design almost
identical to Canada's brooding monument to punishment, Kingston
Penitentiary. Kresty, the Russian word for crosses, refers to the shape of
the two complexes, though it could easily allude to crucifixion, a
punishment not far removed from being jammed into the prison's cells.

When its was completed in 1892, Kresty had an official capacity of 1,150;
its current official capacity is 2,065. About 10,000 men now live in its cells.

Originally, each eight-square-metre cell held two men -- in line with
current international standards that call for at least four square metres
of space per prisoner. Today, instead of two beds, there are six, stacked
three-deep on either side of the cell. Authorities would like to install
more beds but there is no room.

The number of beds in each cell does not, however, reflect, the number of
prisoners. Most of the two-man cells house 11, 12 or even 13 prisoners. In
the 1930s and 1940s, when famed Russian poet Anna Andreevna Akhmatova made
Kresty a symbol of Stalin's Terror, the overcrowding was less severe than
today.

A guard swings open one of the steel, vault-like doors and a wash of hot,
fetid air pours out. Even in early February the prisoners' bodies and
breath have turned the cell into a humid greenhouse that reeks of body
odour and the cell toilet.

Eight pale faces look up. I nod; they stare. I'm not permitted to speak to
them and they are forbidden to speak to me without a guard's permission.
Paul Miller, the photographer who accompanies me, raises his camera and
draws smiles.

Stepping inside, I feel as if I've entered a submarine. Every inch of space
is stuffed with bunks, books, a sink, a radio, the toilet, heads, bodies.
Over every spare surface, clothes hang to dry.

The ceiling slopes to a narrow, peaked window like that of a medieval
fortress or a monk's cell. The window is covered with metal slats --
nicknamed "eyelashes" -- that allow some light but block all views of the
outside world.

The men look young, perhaps in their early 20s, their shaven heads making
them appear younger still. They wear shabby civilian clothes, mostly baggy
jogging pants and sweaters, the only indication that these men have yet to
be convicted.

Right now, four of their cellmates are in the exercise yard. Those who
stayed behind did so hoping for the luxury of lying down on a bunk.

Russian law limits pre-trial detention to one year, but there is no limit
to how long prisoners can be held during trial or while waiting for
sentencing or transportation to a prison. A combination of delays can keep
men locked up for years. About 800 of Kresty's inmates have been here for
between one to two years; 130 have been in for two to three years; nine
have been held for more than three years. In extreme cases, a prisoner can
spend five or six years in pre-trial detention. In Moscow, one man spent
seven years in this limbo.

There are provisions for releasing accused on bail, but bond, for most, is
too expensive. A more serious barrier to pre-trial release is the enormous
authority held by investigators and prosecutors, who naturally prefer to
keep the accused locked up. In part, that's because it's easier to build a
case against someone who is always available for interrogation.

Prosecutors also use pre-trial detention to press defendants. Chronic
underfunding of criminal justice has turned trials into the system's
bottleneck; in the St. Petersburg region, two-thirds of prisoners are held
in pre-trial detention centres. Conditions at these centres, including
Kresty, are often the worst in the whole prison system.

After conviction, prisoners are sent to one of five different types of
prison; while the toughest of these can be likened to medieval dungeons,
the low-security facilities are not much different than minimum-security
prisons in the West. Pre-trial detention facilities such as Kresty are so
overcrowded, they are in many ways as brutal as the maximum-security
dungeons. So if a prisoner is inside Kresty on a lesser charge that could
land him in any but the worst prisons, it is only rational to give up.
"There are people who confess," says Peter Solomon, a professor at the
University of Toronto's Centre for Russian and East European Studies, "in
order to get themselves out as quickly as possible to a regular prison."

For those who refuse to buckle, the small, squalid cells of Kresty and
other pre-trial detention centres become their whole world. Here they read,
wash dishes and clothes, sleep, defecate, shave and fight.

Prisoners are allowed to wash once a week in the banya, a Russian sauna.
They can also exercise once a day in outdoor concrete pens that resemble
filthy dog kennels.

Food is watery porridge, cabbage leaves, fish soup and bread. Government
funding for food amounts to six to eight rubles a day per prisoner --
roughly 37 to 49 cents.

Igor, a 37-year-old ex-con who has been held in Kresty several times, knows
the exercise pens well. In the winter, he says, guards will sometimes keep
prisoners locked out there "for a couple of hours -- to freeze your lice."

Worse still is the summer. St. Petersburg was built on a swamp so during
the summer the air is thick with humidity and mosquitoes. Inside Kresty,
temperatures can rise to 40 C. "In the cell, in the summertime, sometimes
it's so hot you can't breathe. Everybody wears just underwear. Everybody's
hot and sweaty."

Inside this pressure cooker, "the strongest ones survive," says Igor. "It's
very strict. If you know somebody, you're going to live a decent life. If
you don't, you're going to sleep under the bunk."

Igor once shared a cell dominated by two young bodybuilders. They were
privileged, meaning they had bunks all to themselves and other prisoners
had to wash their clothes and dishes. One big man was particularly abused.
He had been "downgraded" -- raped. The bodybuilders "used him for boxing
practice."

Igor, a short, slight man, survived by luck. One of his many cellmates was
a friend he made during a previous spell in prison. The man had become a
"brigadier" in the St. Petersburg mob and he made it known Igor was not to
be touched.

Suicide attempts are frequent, one guard told me. "Mostly they try to slash
their wrists, but it's virtually impossible to slash your wrists so badly
in a cell that it can't be mended. And his cellmates will call for a guard."

Every prisoner can receive packages, letters and visits from relatives and
friends. But visits are at the discretion of prosecutors. "They usually
refuse," says Igor. "So if your trial lasts for years, then for years you
don't see anyone."

This is why Maxim Maslov and others are found, on any given day, on the
Neva's shore. They should not be there but it's ignored unless the crowd
gets too large. Then police will rush in and make arrests.

Those prisoners whose cells face the river have managed to bend or break
windows' metal slats. Those standing on the riverbank communicate with
prisoners by drawing messages in the air, one letter at a time. Maslov is
an expert, waving his gloved hand quickly. After each letter, a distant,
pink hand pokes through a cell window either flopping up or down or shaking
side to side.

Prisoners answer via airmail. But their blowguns, either taped or
shellacked to stiffen the shaft, wouldn't be able to shoot the darts the
required 40 metres to the Neva without a round, moulded cone for
aerodynamic mass. The cones are made of putty produced by chewing bread and
mixing it with saliva.

The putty is versatile stuff. From it, prisoners fashion every object
imaginable, from fake guns and knives used in escape attempts to figurines
of convicts and guards, even astonishingly detailed chess sets.

Igor, smiling with satisfaction, calls this sort of ingenuity "the wisdom
of the poor."

Poverty is something the guards share with the prisoners. Even after a
recent 20-per-cent pay hike, guards earn on average only 1,000 to 1,200
rubles a month -- about $60 to $64. Even though guards pay only half the
average rent for an apartment (a subsidy the government wants to
eliminate), a family-sized apartment can cost a guard 500 rubles a month.

Inevitably, the prisons are saturated with corruption. When in Kresty,
Maxim Maslov and seven cellmates paid guards 2,000 rubles a month for the
comfort of a cell with only eight occupants. Guards take bribes for
placement in cells facing the Neva. Extra food and televisions are also
sources of extra income. So are drugs.

Drug abuse is rising so rapidly throughout Russia, claims Mikhail Zharkoi,
spokesman for the prison administration, that in St. Petersburg the "number
of drug-related crimes has grown tenfold." The response has been to
increase arrests. Russia has nine prisons that specialize in treating
addiction, but most drug offenders and addicts are trapped in pre-trial
detention centres such as Kresty. Maslov guesses that more than half of
those he met in Kresty were there on drug possession charges -- most caught
with heroin but some with marijuana.

Many inmates who had never used drugs begin in prison. "There's nothing to
do," explains Maslov. "It's boredom."

Heroin use is common. Prison drugs are even more expensive than they are on
the street. That makes prisoners want to maximize the high, so they inject
it either with black-market needles or needles jerry-rigged from ballpoint
pens. Both types of needles are scarce and expensive. So they share
needles, and in doing so they share HIV and hepatitis as well.

Ten years ago in Kresty, one prisoner had HIV; now 700 are infected.
Virtually all are injection drug users. Infected prisoners share cells, but
otherwise they endure the same conditions as the rest of the prison population.

This crude form of isolation is also applied to prisoners with
tuberculosis, a killer with deep roots in Russian history. During the First
World War, Russia lost 1.7 million soldiers in battle; during the same
period, two million civilians died from tuberculosis. After the Second
World War, Soviet health officials, armed with unlimited power to herd
people into quarantine, cut TB rates dramatically, but the collapse of the
U.S.S.R. has brought a resurgence of the disease.

The immense prison population was critical to the return of TB. When a
person with active TB coughs, sneezes or even talks, germs are expelled
into the air; infection can occur when another person inhales them.
Naturally, TB finds crowding of any kind congenial -- and large prisons
teeming with sickly inmates are ideal breeding grounds.

Today, 10 per cent of Russia's one million prisoners are thought to have
active tuberculosis. That makes the prison system an "epidemiological
pump," as experts put it: Vast numbers of bodies are being drawn in,
infected, and pumped back to the cities, towns and villages. Thanks largely
to this process, Eastern Europe, and particularly Russia, have seen the
largest jumps in TB infections of any region outside sub-Saharan Africa.

With the evidence of failure so close at hand, Russian justice officials
are working hard for reform. Some officials genuinely admire the Western
European approach, with its focus on alternatives to imprisonment, and
believe that it is both more humane and more effective.

For others, it's money. Russia is spending roughly a billion dollars a year
on its mammoth prison system, money desperately needed for higher priorities.

In 1996, Russia joined the Council of Europe, and agreed, as a condition of
membership, to follow its human rights standards, including abolition of
the death penalty -- something that has effectively been done, although not
formally. Boris Yeltsin fulfilled another demand by transferring prison
administration from the interior ministry -- which has the conflicting
responsibility of overseeing prosecutions -- to the ministry of justice. In
1997, a new criminal code provided judges with alternatives to prison,
including community service.

Recently, Vladimir Putin pushed a new code of procedure through the Duma
that stripped prosecutors of the power to issue arrest and search warrants
and handed it to judges. The new code also guarantees the right to a trial
by jury, a major change: While the acquittal rate in old-style Russian
trials is one per cent, experiments with jury trials have produced
acquittal rates of 20 per cent.

Deputy justice minister Yuri Kalinin told a Moscow television interviewer
that the justice system must have a new goal: "To keep people out of
prison." Alexander Zubkov, a top prison administration official, was more
blunt when he told a Russian radio interviewer that rising prison
populations "lead nowhere, it's a dead end.... Experience has shown that it
is wrong." The objective must always be to reduce prison populations,
Zubkov said, because "prisons have never had any positive influence on a
person's moral standards."

Such a seismic shift in policy will take much more than legislative change.
As Kalinin noted, "we also need to change the mindset" throughout the
criminal justice system. After almost 70 years of tough-on-crime policies,
prison will be a hard habit to break.

In the twilight of a winter afternoon, the handful of people watching the
windows of Kresty has dwindled. Three teenaged girls huddle, shivering in
the damp air. One of them, Anastasia, 16, is hoping for a message from her
26-year-old boyfriend who has been charged with heroin possession. She
shuffles her running shoes in the wet snow and waits.

Maxim Maslov drains a bottle of beer and drops it without looking down. His
face is heavily pitted and lined. He has been imprisoned in Kresty four
times, but he remains unsentimental. Kresty is hard, but the young man's
face looks harder. The prison certainly doesn't scare him. It's not likely
it can deter him, either.

Maslov shows me the message-dart and the note from his friend, asking his
mother to bring cigarettes.

A bouquet of wilted flowers tied to a lamppost drips water sprayed by the
passing traffic. Dozens of empty darts litter the sidewalk, dissolving in
the filthy slush.

With the light failing, the visitors drift away like so many before them.