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In south-central Ural city of Chelyabinsk, four inmates died of their wounds on May 31st, after they were severely beaten by prison guards. As the ITAR-TASS news agency reported, officials said the prisoners attacked guards during a morning exercise walk, and prison authorities retaliated with rubber batons. The prisoners were put in separate cells, and were beyond saving when medical personnel were called in later that evening. A criminal investigation has been started, but the head of Russia’s prison service, Yury Kalinin, said the use of force was justified.

“Maintaining discipline is the top-most priority of the penal system’s workers,” he said in a press-release, as quoted by RIA Novosti, “and that’s why they were forced to use clubs. Furthermore, the inmates weren’t unarmed themselves.”

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In the northern Arkhangelsk oblast, around 50 prisoners went on hunger strike on June 1st, according to the Regnum news agency. The inmates, held in a prison medical facility for tuberculosis patients, complained of substandard food, improper medical care, and treatment they said was becoming more severe. Prison officials said that everything was in order and said the inmates simply wanted to avoid serving their sentences. A majority have since called off their protest.

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In a maximum-security penal colony in the central Ural Sverdlovsk oblast, prisoners staged a mass hunger strike on June 3rd to demand better access to the prison store. As RIA Novosti reports, the inmates are currently limited in how much they can spend there. Aside from purchasing items at the store, inmates of maximum-security facilities are allowed to receive one package and one small postal parcel each year. Local officials called the protest illegal.

Prisoners at another penal colony in the city of Dimitrovgrad, Ulyanovsk oblast also went on hunger strike. According to the Sobkor®ru news agency, the protest started on May 29th, and was already in its sixth day as of June 3rd. The inmates, part of a special unit for former militsiya officers, say authorities have withheld parcels and items sent by family.

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The head of the security division of penal colony in the Republic of Mordovia was sentenced to four years behind bars, after he was found guilty of beating two inmates. As the Sobkor®ru news agency reported on June 4th, Yevgeny Oshkin invited the two prisoners into his office one at a time, and stuck them repeatedly with a club. In addition to jail time, Oshkin is barred from working in any capacity with prisoners for two years.

The Republic’s regional prison administration is currently experiencing a workforce shortage in its 17 penal colonies and 3 pretrial detention centers. As a consequence, some 60 percent of prison guards in the Republic are women.

Andrei Naletov, an expert from the For Human Rights movement, and a representative of the Fund for the Defense of Prisoner’s Rights said the result was promising, but was hesitant to call it a victory. He spoke with the Gazeta.ru online newspaper:

“The administration decided to make concessions,” Naletov said. “Agreements were reached on improving incarceration conditions and passing on the inmate’s complaints to the public prosecutors at various levels [of power].” He added that prison officials went for a compromise only after the media reported on the hunger strike.

“According to relatives of the inmates, the situation is ambiguous for the moment,” he continued. “Those who declared they were going on hunger strike and those who sent out complaints of living in poor conditions, will be taken out of the facility, and [the authorities] will attempt to get rid of them.”

Officials had earlier denied that there were any problems at the prison colony, and said that no hunger strike was taking place. Valery Zaitsev, a representative of Russian prison service, told Ekho Moskvy radio on May 9th that he had “gotten in touch with the management of the correctional colony,” and that “there was nothing there.”

It later became clear that inmates had started the protest on May 9th as a last resort after weeks of unanswered calls for help. Attempts to make contact with higher authorities were apparently dismissed by prison staff.

One group of prisoners had written letters describing their inhumane conditions to the public prosecutor’s office of the Samara oblast and the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia. Prison administrators, however, refused to forward the complaints, and began punishing the convicts that wrote them, according to a prisoner’s rights group called In Defense of Inmates. The group reported that the convicts who wrote letters were put into punitive isolation for non-existent violations. On May 8th, one of the initial complainants, Vladimir Yelbakiev, approached the prison authorities and asked about the status of the grievances. In response, Yelbakiev was brutally beaten by guards.

Penal colony number 6 has seen similar incidents before. In October 2007, an inmate was killed by prison staff under circumstances similar to those described by Yelbakiev. In that case, In Defense of Inmates was able to launch a criminal case.

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Read “Putin’s Torture Colonies,” an examination of prisons in modern-day Russia (Wall Street Journal)