A photo report from Kachanovka, a high female penitentiary colony in Kharkiv where those sentenced for life serve.
Ukraine has 1,553 criminals sentenced to life in prison, but only 17 of them are women. They are all serving their term in Kachanovka, a female penitentiary colony, with a special block for those with life terms.
These 17 women are convicted of leaving a trail of 48 dead bodies outside prison. Many of them, such as Lyubov Kushynska [7] and Svitlana Misan [5], continue appealing and hope to be released one day. Kushynska, who has served 12 years, was found guilty of murdering clients of her real estate company in Lviv who wanted to sell their property to her. Misan and her two sons were sentenced for killing their neighbors. The sons received more than 14 years in prison. Both women maintain their innocence.
Before 1997, when capital punishment was canceled in Ukraine, many of these women could have been sentenced to death. The new criminal code, adopted in 1999, replaced capital punishment with a life sentence. It may yet be replaced with a 30-year-old prison term, if a new law currently registered in Verkhovna Rada is approved.
This is a dream of those who are sentenced for life. “I wish they gave us a term to serve, let it be 30 years, but not not the whole life,” says Misan[5].The total number of inmates in Kachanovka high security colony is close to 700 [2,6]. About 20 percent of them are serving a sentence for murder. Inmates spend their days working in a sewing workshop [3] on the territory of the colony, and are searched thoroughly [1] after their return to residential blocks.
