ussian prisons sinking under tide of arrests - Amnesty.

Russian prisons sinking under tide of arrests.

Hands wave madly through the bars as men signal to their womenfolk from crammed cells along the red-brick walls. Grimy old Kresty prison seems like a wounded bird, flapping vainly in an attempt to fly.

In stifling summer heat, it is an image of the overcrowding that has reached crisis level in Russian jails following the collapse of communism and the social chaos it has brought. With money short and voters keen to see a crackdown on crime, there seems little prospect of quick relief for the one million Russians now in jail. But there are signs that the government is at least starting to heed its critics at home and abroad.

Outside Kresty, Sveta waved her arms at a hand signalling from a cell on the third floor. Using a laborious semaphore-type code, she told her 34-year-old husband Dima: "Write soon."

"There are 13 of them in a 10 square metre (100 square foot) cell," she said. "It's so dirty, he got sick." Dima has been inside for two years. He is still awaiting trial on a fraud charge and has not been allowed to see his wife in that time.
"It's dark, hot, there's no air. People are sick. It's just hell," said Dmitry, 24, recalling the time he spent inside Kresty last year.
"It's an awful spectacle," St Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev admitted after visiting the prison this summer.

SURGE IN PRISON NUMBERS

Kresty is intended to hold 3,300 people. There are 10,000 there now. Officials do not welcome visits by journalists. Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky was sent to Kresty by the tsar's secret police. Today more than a dozen men, most of them awaiting trial, share the same cell Trotsky occupied alone. Yakovlev said some prisoners had just half a square metre (five square feet) of floor space.

Russia's prison population has risen 50 percent to about a million since 1991. That is, proportionately, about 10 times the number held in west European states. The number of people in pre-trial detention has doubled to nearly 300,000. Some 18,000 prisoners have tuberculosis, according to official figures.

The human rights group Amnesty International described the overcrowding in Russian jails as "amounting to torture." In a report in April, it noted the deaths from heat stroke of 11 inmates at a crammed Siberian prison in 1995. The group also documented widespread beatings and other physical torture. Yet a lack of money means there is little prospect of building new jails or speeding up the courts. Legislators say they have more pressing concerns than finding alternatives to prison for minor offences or pre-trial supervision.

"We are building palaces and cathedrals and we are not building prisons," human rights activist Lev Razgon wrote in July, saying the disparity was immoral. He said today's prisons were worse than when he was arrested in 1938 during Stalin's Great Terror, when hundreds of thousands were sent to the gulag camps.

AMNESTY TO AVERT "SOCIAL EXPLOSION"

Prosecutor-General Yuri Skuratov has said there could be a "social explosion" in city jails and gulag-style labour camps. He urged officials to develop bail and probation procedures to keep those yet to be convicted or not dangerous out of prison. In May, he called on President Boris Yeltsin simply to amnesty almost half the prison population. Last month, Yeltsin wrote to the communist opposition-dominated parliament suggesting an amnesty which could benefit 445,000.

"Declaring the amnesty will not only be a humanitarian gesture on the part of the state," Yeltsin said.
"It will also let us ease the extremely tense situation in penal establishments and make it possible to bring the conditions of confinement for convicts and those in custody into line with generally recognised standards."

However, the Interior Ministry said only 35,000 would be freed if parliament supported the amnesty. Those, like most in Kresty, who have yet to be convicted, are not included. The happiest person among those signalling outside Kresty was 19-year-old Vika. Her husband Sasha had finally been convicted after two years in custody. He got three years for theft and would now serve the final year of his sentence in a rural prison camp. "He'll be much healthier there," Vika said with a grin.

PRISONERS ARE PETTY CROOKS, NOT BIG-TIME CRIMINALS

Yeltsin's amnesty is a sign that the leadership is at least embarrassed by the problem of overcrowding and beginning to look at ways to do something about it. Many officials recognise that the vast majority of those behind bars are, at worst, petty offenders. Those responsible for wholesale corruption, organised crime and contract murders are rarely caught. If they are, money helps to ease the pain.

The friends and relatives outside Kresty told similar stories of officials asking for bribes to turn a blind eye.
"They wanted $15,000 to let Sasha go," said Vika.

The Prime Minister has ordered the Justice Ministry to take over responsibility for prisons from the Interior Ministry, in line with European recommendations. Justice Minister Sergei Stepashin, hawkish former head of the security service, condemned the fact that average cell space per prisoner is just two sq metres (20 sq feet), half the European minimum.
"A country should only keep as many prisoners as it can afford," he said.

In Moscow at least, some new prison space is being built.

In October Yeltsin plans to address the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Russia joined the body last year -- an event hailed by Yeltsin as a seal of approval for his democratic reforms.

But Moscow has faced criticism over human rights, notably its failure to abolish the death penalty. The amnesty may be an effort to defuse some objections before the Strasbourg trip.

HARSHEST INDICTMENT

Ironically, attempts so far to comply with the Council of Europe have created even more problems for prisons. Yeltsin decreed a moratorium on executions a year ago -- but there is little provision for exercise, education or simply distraction in the only two prisons which accept those whose death sentences have now been commuted to life imprisonment. The maximum jail sentence under the old system was 15 years.

Perhaps the harshest indictment of Russia's prisons comes from some of those spared the bullet and given life terms.

Anatoly Pristavkin, the writer who chairs the presidential Pardons Committee which grants the reprieves, told Reuters: "A lot of them write back to us. They beg to be shot."

Strapped for cash and alarmed over Russia's seemingly bottomless economic slump, President Boris Yeltsin has suggested pardoning some of the people most to blame.

This week Mr. Yeltsin said he was thinking of declaring an amnesty for Russians who have tricked the taxman, defrauded customs and stabbed their ailing country in the back by illegally exporting an estimated $100-billion to safe havens abroad since 1991. The only catch: they must agree to give the impoverished Russian government a little slice of it.

"There were very interesting proposals concerning an economic amnesty for those who keep money in foreign bank accounts," Mr. Yeltsin said after emerging from a meeting with parliamentary leaders Wednesday.
"We might take 10 or 15 percent of the sum, but no criminal charges will be filed," Mr. Yeltsin said. "We might get tens of billions of dollars. I'm not speaking about that as of a thing already decided, but this a possibility and we will seriously work on that."

The idea of pardoning those responsible for Russia's massive post-Soviet capital flight has been floated before, but high government officials have generally avoided it because of the firestorm of ethical questions it raises.

Estimates of the amount of money illegally siphoned out of Russia since the USSR collapsed start at around $70-billion -- or $1-billion per month -- and run upwards of $300-billion. Most analysts say the best guess is around $100-billion.

"Capital flight from this country vastly outweighs the amount of foreign aid and investment that has been coming in," says Leonid Abalkin, director of the Institute of Economics.
"Even as Russia is trapped in one of the deepest economic depressions in history, we have been effectively sending large- scale financial assistance to the West."

Among the biggest illegal exporters of capital are Russian organized criminals, shady businessmen and corrupt officials. Russia's top prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, recently revealed that huge sums have been sent out of the country through the use of bogus import contracts, under which goods are paid for through legal bank transfers but never actually delivered. His department uncovered 3,000 such phony deals in the past two years alone.
"There are many problems with the idea of an amnesty for illegal capital, but the biggest are moral and social," says Alexander Buzgalin, a Moscow University political economist.
"If you let these people bring their money back with no questions asked, it will basically legitimize the criminal processes by which much of that money was earned in the first place," he says. "What kind of signal does this send to society?"

Supporters of the idea say it may be morally troubling but nevertheless coldly practical. Russia is suffering from a crippling capital shortage, and cannot afford to be choosy about where new investment comes from.

A survey by the Russian Academy of Sciences this year found that investment in the Russian economy is running at barely a quarter of its 1990 level.

An amnesty for returning money could stipulate that it must be invested in new businesses or legal Russian securities. That way a bad thing could be turned to worthwhile ends, such as creating jobs and stimulating economic growth, supporters say.

But critics are doubtful.
"Most of the money is already gone, let's face it," says Mr. Buzgalin.
"It's already been invested in real estate abroad, or joined that great, faceless stream of global finance that jumps from one market to the next looking for a higher rate of return," he says.
"An amnesty won't bring back much of that cash. All it will do is tell Russia's criminal businessmen and corrupt officialdom that possessing wealth is the only value that matters.
"The message to them is: it's OK to go on stealing, you will be forgiven later."