Research
🇱🇻 Visit to Latvia: A Dialogue on Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners and Informal Prison Hierarchies
🇱🇻 I had the great honour and privilege of speaking with staff from the Prison Service of the Republic of Latvia. Words can hardly capture my gratitude — and genuine delight — at the warmth of what I encountered when I visited the newly established Training Centre for Prison Officers and met with so many…
🇻🇪 Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Faced Systematic Torture, Report Finds
🇻🇪 More than 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault, during their detention, according to a report published on Wednesday. The report, compiled jointly by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Cristosal – a group investigating violations in Central America –…
🇲🇩 Lyu Azbel, Mary Tate, Dan Bromberg and Frederick Altice: Resisting Methadone: Criminal Subculture and Methadone Implementation in Moldovan Prisons
🇲🇩 Maintenance treatment with methadone (MMT) is globally recommended as a key strategy for HIV prevention and addiction treatment in prisons, yet implementation remains limited. Moldova offers a rare exception, where MMT has been available in prisons for over two decades, though uptake remains low. This study aims to examine how criminal subcultures, widespread in…
Harutyun Khachikyan: The Origins of Prison Subculture
“Criminal subculture” is an antisocial, instigating phenomenon that not only differs from, but also opposes the general culture, the dominant values. It is obvious that this subculture is the result of criminal and antisocial activity, which survives and is preserved in the criminal environment from generation to generation, it is one of the most serious…
Dmytro Yagunov: Prison Subculture or National Prison Culture. Importation of Russian Neocolonial Narratives in the 21 Century
The article is focused on the origins of Russian criminal and prison subculture and the current state of this phenomenon, which is imported by the Russian Federation within its imperialistic neocolonial policy aimed at restoring the ‘Soviet space’. In order to analyse the preconditions for the emergence of the Russian criminal and prison subculture, it…
The Colonial Legacy of the “Wagner State” and the Destruction of the Russian Cultural Code
By creating a giant colony beyond the Urals, unparalleled in world history, and populating it mainly with criminal elements, the Muscovite Tsardom and the Russian Empire laid a time bomb not only under their economy, but also under the very cultural code of the country. This mine has already exploded several times and continues to…
‘Zhigany’ and “Urki”: From the White Guards to ‘Thieves-in-Law’
The modern self-designations of ‘thieves’ such as ‘law-abiding’, ‘lawful thieves’, and ‘thieves-in-law’ also originate from the pre-Revolutionary subculture of the ‘vagrants’. The category of a ‘vagrant-lawyer’ was popular among prisoners back in the 19th century. A ‘vagrant-lawyer’ was well versed not only in the laws of the Russian Empire, but also in ways to circumvent…
