Conditions in Ukrainian prisons are shocking, even to Ukraine’s justice minister.
Before Denys Malyuska, 38, was appointed justice minister a year ago, he had never visited a Ukrainian prison or a pre-trial detention center.
Here’s what he saw: Food that doesn’t look edible (sometimes with cockroaches), barely lit cells covered with mold, violence and extortion common among prisoners, violence, staff corruption and the spread of infection diseases.
“The prison is a state inside a state with its own business, own bandits and criminal life,” Malyuska told the Kyiv Post. “It’s a closed society with its own rules.”
And thousands of inmates have to abide by these rules in most of the prisons across Ukraine.
What to do? The Ministry of Justice and Malyuska have a plan. They want to sell almost one-third of Ukraine’s 100 or so prisons within the next two years and use the money to build new ones with better conditions, less corruption and reduced maintenance costs.
The only strategy
Currently, Ukraine with nearly 53,000 prisoners has the highest number of prisoners per capita among European countries — 125 per 100,000 residents. And 40% of them are staying in overcrowded pre-trial detention centers, sometimes spending years while waiting for a court verdict, according to the department on the execution of criminal penalties of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s standards of living space per prisoner is only 2.5 square meters, almost twice as small as what is required by the anti-torture committee of the Council of Europe.
According to the report made by the Social Communications Research Center, Ukraine was among the top three European countries regarding the number of complaints on poor prison conditions filed to the European Court of Human Rights last year. Out of nearly 60,000 cases, 15% were against Ukraine.
Because of this, courts in European Union countries often refuse to extradite a person to Ukraine, even those indicted on corruption charges.
Currently, the government can allocate only half of the money needed to cover all expenses of prisons — a modest $280 million in 2019. Today, less than $1 is spent on food for prisoners per day, according to Malyuska.
“Our sales and prison liquidations are aimed to change it,” he said.
Malyuska is sure that selling prisons to finance the renovation of other prisons is a good option.
First of all, the prisons for sale are not functioning, with only security workers look after empty buildings. This happened because the number of prisoners has sharply decreased from the 137,000 that Ukraine incarcerated in 2013. And Ukraine pays from its budget $400,000 a year just to maintain those derelict prisons.
Even operating prisons currently are not more than 70% full.
One of the reasons for that is a law that lawmakers passed four years ago, leading to the release of nearly 34,000 prisoners. The law said that one day in a pre-trial detention center equals to two days in prison.
While it’s still not clear how much money the Ministry of Justice will receive in a selloff, Malyuska believes it’s a first step.
Besides, several thousand workers – from a total of 22,000 – will be laid off because they will no longer be needed. The idea is to raise the salaries of the remaining prison workers by 30%, to at least $450, something that Malyuska believes will restrain from bribes and corruption inside the prisons.
“We are getting rid of prisons as it’s the only possible strategy, from which the state can benefit,” said Malyuska.
Justice Minister Denys Malyuska speaks with the Kyiv Post on Aug. 13, 2020 in his office in Kyiv. The Ministry of Justice wants to sell almost one-third of Ukraine’s 100 or so prisons within the next two years and use the money to build new ones with better conditions, less corruption and reduced maintenance costs. (Volodymyr Petrov)
First prisons to go
The Ministry of Justice has already chosen the first two prisons to sell on auction, which will be held on state e-procurement website ProZorro by the end of September.
The first prison for sale is located just 2.8 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, in the city of Kotsiubynske with a population of around 15,000 people. The 24,000-square-meter prison has several buildings and stands on an eight-hectare land plot.
The second one has 14,000 square meters and is just four kilometers south of Odesa, near the Black Sea. In May 2019, this prison was damaged as a result of a fire that started during a riot convicts, who were protesting against poor conditions and disgusting food.
Malyuska sees that many business people are already interested in and ready to buy such objects, especially if these prisons are located near big cities like Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv or Odesa.
“Potential businesses have been circling around those prisons for years,” he said. “I have no doubts that there will be a great competition.”
Most likely, in the place of prisons, the buildings will be renovated to residential projects. Property developers won’t have to worry about external and internal engineering networks, as well as gas and water connections — they are already there.
Beating, maiming, name it
When Malyuska began to see the reality of prisons for himself, the spectrum of his emotions ranged from “horror” to “a living utopia written by a crazy writer.”
For instance, in Kharkiv’s 25th high-security prison, the minister saw pigs sleeping to the accompaniment of classical music, each in a separate aviary, handmade wooden ladders, turtles swimming across artificial ponds. It felt for him as if he was not in prison, but in a holiday house.
“All prisoners were very super disciplined there,” he said. He didn’t know the price that prisoners pay for such order — with their health or even their lives.
Inmates of this prison have been complaining about torture by the staff for many years. A person could be tied to a chair with duct tape for a week, not being able to go to the toilet normally. This prison’s staff is accused of beating and maiming prisoners and even staging “suicides” if someone refuses to follow orders, Slidstvo.info investigative project reported on April 4.
Such prisons, where the administration has extremely strong power, are also called “red prisons.”
The person who heads the “red prison” controls every process inside it.
“They are kings of their territories,” Malyuska said. “Everybody listens to their orders and they have a total control on every side of life: food, medicine, punishment.”
“Unpleasant, but a working mechanism,” he added.
In other jails, Malyuska felt as if he walked into a headquarters for crime bosses. These prisons are called “black prisons.” There, criminals control all processes, from distribution of drugs, protection of gambling, organizing fraudulent businesses and even food supply.
Inside such a prison, it’s normal to see an insane number of prohibited activities while officials simply “do not notice it.”
“Everyone makes money on it and everyone is OK with that,” Malyuska said. “The number of illegal activities prohibited by law (in black prisons) is so large that we will not be able to stop them immediately.”
While saying that Ukraine has more black than red prisons, the minister didn’t want to specify exactly in which proportion.
But what surprised Malyuska the most is that pretrial detention centers can also be “black.” Like in Kropyvnytskyi, home to 226,000 people located 300 kilometers south of Kyiv, which has one of the worst pretrial detention centers in the country.
Or like another one in Kherson, the southern provincial capital of nearly 300,000 residents located more than 500 kilometers south of Kyiv.
“When we arrived there, it was hard to distinguish employees from detainees,” said Malyuska. “Their clothes and behavior were identical, and the workers hardly understood their responsibilities.”
Killing corruption
As a starting point to eliminate corruption in state prisons, in May, the Ministry of Justice started selling cells that have better conditions in pretrial detention centers. It was something that already existed before, but wasn’t official.
In the past, it meant bribes and corruption for humane conditions, but now, it’s a “wonderful anti-corruption measure,” since the money paid goes to the state budget and helps renovate other pretrial detention centers, Malyuska said.
As of the beginning of August, nearly $20,000 has already been collected from 30 pay-to-stay cells in 21 Ukrainian cities. At the same time, what in Ukraine is now called paid cells, in European countries is just an ordinary one for which inmates don’t pay anything.
“When all prisons are like today’s paid cells, then we won’t charge money for this,” he said.
The minister sees other holes in the state penitentiary system that need to be filled using state lands and quarries that belong to prisons and are managed by corrupt officials or through various shady schemes.
It turned out that the food demand in prisons could be fully satisfied too without any state financing, for prisons have enough land to do grow it.
But still corruption prevails: one common scheme is when a land plot is illegally transferred to some firms for farming.
“In most cases, they have always been a source of embezzlement,” said Malyuska. “All steal and they will have to stop doing it.”
