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."
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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.

Normally, TB is easily treated with a steady, months-long regimen of drugs. But underfunding has made TB treatment in Russia's prisons only sporadic. That allows the bug to mutate and new, drug-resistant varieties of TB are flourishing at a terrifying rate. A Harvard study estimates that among Russian prisoners with active TB, more than half have TB that is resistant to at least one drug, while 20 per cent to 30 per cent have TB that is resistant to several.

TB casts a pall over Russia's amnesty plans since there are fears that releasing up to one-third of prisoners could spark an epidemic. But if the overcrowding isn't eased, the prisons will continue to generate the plague. And prisoners, even those yet to be convicted of a crime, will continue to be at risk of infection and death.

Col. Stepan Demchuk, warden of Kresty, mocks politicians who grandstand on crime. "'Let's crush it, let's be tough on it, let's have order.' " He shrugs. "This is all stupid."

With Col. Demchuk wearing a military-style uniform and surrounded by the trappings of the Russian state, few would accuse him of being a softheaded liberal. But the warden has only contempt for the idea that being tough on criminals is an effective way to control crime. "We know from history that when people would cut off the hands of thieves, it didn't stop theft, right? This idea about being tough, getting tougher, is a dogma."

Under the Czars, the criminal justice system was always stern, though not cruel on the scale of 20th-century dictatorships.

The Russian Revolution briefly brought a reforming spirit. The original Bolshevik leadership shared European liberals' distaste for prisons and criminal punishment, believing them tools of oppression. After taking power, they emphasized "non-custodial sanctions and alternatives," notes Peter Solomon. Fines were common. "And for a lot of lesser crimes ... they encouraged judges to assign a punishment that they designed themselves, called 'compulsory work' or 'corrective work.'" In effect, the Bolsheviks invented what we now call community service.

In 1928, to encourage the use of community service, judges were forbidden to issue prison sentences of less than one year. In 1930, only 10 per cent of sentences involved incarceration (by comparison, in Canada today, about one-third of convictions result in a prison sentence).
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But by the early 1930s, the Communist Party, firmly in the grip of Josef Stalin, radicalized efforts to mould society in its preferred image. Collective farms, famine and political terror followed. The countryside disintegrated, spurring a vast migration from rural Russia to urban centres. "Life in the cities became quite wild by 1933," says Solomon. There were "lots of homeless people, juvenile delinquents, and a big increase in street crime."

This worried Stalin whose solution, as usual, was force. Crime had to be controlled by harsh punishments that would incapacitate criminals and deter others.

The core of Stalin's approach was to send many more criminals to prison and to detain them much longer. By the late 1940s, 60 per cent of convictions were punished with incarceration. Sentence lengths were increased, in part by the creation of mandatory minimum sentences for crimes such as "hooliganism" and petty theft. By 1940, a fistfight could land a man in prison for two years.

Stalin also got tough on young offenders. In 1935, the law was changed to require children as young as 14 to be punished as adults for all crimes. In cases involving the most serious crimes, children as young as 12 were tried as adults.

In 1938, Stalin abolished parole.

At the beginning of the Second World War, new crimes were introduced, such as quitting a job without permission. After the war, sentences were raised for crimes ranging from rape to home brewing. Crime rates fell as the incarceration rate increased but it was demographics, not the law, that caused that decline. The war killed well over a third of Russia's young men -- the group responsible for most crime.

Most notoriously, Stalin personally drafted new penalties for theft: Stealing personal property meant a mandatory minimum sentence of five years, while theft of state property was punished with at least seven years in prison. Anyone caught stealing a second time would receive a minimum 10 years and a maximum of 25.

"So instead of people being sentenced to three years or five years," Solomon concludes, "you had large numbers of ordinary criminals getting eight to 20 years. That's what really expanded the (prison) system."

By 1950, the Soviet Union had a rate of incarceration like no other country before or since. Exactly how many citizens were imprisoned isn't certain but a low estimate puts the total at more than 2.5 million people -- a rate of imprisonment of 1,423 prisoners for every 100,000 people, or 1.4 per cent of the entire population. The vast majority were convicted of non-political crimes. (Today the United States incarcerates more than two million people, but maintains a rate of imprisonment about half that of Stalin's Soviet Union.)

The U.S.S.R. was able and willing to sustain this immense network because prison labour was ideally suited to central planning. Wherever labour was deemed necessary, the authorities would simply build a camp and stock it with prisoners who could be worked to death. Canals, railways, dams, roads and other infrastructure were typically built with prison labour. So were factories in Siberia and other undeveloped regions. Forestry, mining and other profitable sectors of the Soviet economy relied heavily on a steady supply of convicts. Prison labour and prisons remained steady money makers for the government until the collapse of communism.

Following Stalin's death in 1953, there was some minor liberalization of the criminal law and the rate of imprisonment receded. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Solomon says, "the curve starts going back up."

By the 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev, "there was a recognition that things had gotten out of hand." There was no wholesale reform but the Soviet Supreme Court did order judges to give fewer prison sentences and the rate fell again, from 669 prisoners per 100,000 population in 1979 to 353 in 1989 (by comparison, Canada today has about 119 prisoners per 100,000).

The final collapse of the Soviet Union, Solomon says, was followed by "the breakdown of the economy and the whole social order, and there was a big rise in crime." By far the largest change was a huge leap in property offences. "When people are poor they steal."

Another great surge of bodies flooded the criminal justice system, causing the imprisonment rate to soar throughout the 1990s. In the free-market economy, prison industries folded, leaving most convicts without any work and the entire prison system became radically underfunded. Instead of generating revenue, prisons drained the Russian treasury at a time when the government could barely afford to pay teachers and soldiers.

For almost 70 years, Russia has maintained one of the world's most brutal criminal justice systems on the theory that brutality controls crime. But that theory has never been borne out. Comparing the long record of tough punishments intended to cut crime and Russia's fluctuating crime rates, Peter Solomon says it's impossible to spot a cause-and-effect relationship between the policies and the crime rates. "There's no evidence to say that harsher punishments had a deterrent effect."

Today, as Russia looks toward the liberal nations of Western Europe, it sees this failure underscored. Its neighbour, Finland, is an especially poignant contrast. Finland was once a Russian province and its criminal justice system was in the Russian tradition until about 30 years ago, when it moved toward the Western European approach. Today, the five million people of Finland employ 8,500 police officers, while the 5.9 million people of Russia's St. Petersburg region alone are policed by 72,000 officers. Finnish courts rarely send offenders to prison and when they do, they give convicts remarkably short sentences in prisons that would be considered luxurious by Russian standards. Yet Finland is a quiet, placid country, while Russia is wracked by crime. The Russian murder rate is 10 times higher than Finland's.

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.

Dan Gardner*'s column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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