What is a Russian Penal Colony?

In Russia and some post-Soviet states, the most common type of prison is a corrective penal colony with 760 institutions in 2004 across Russia’s many administrative divisions.

In Russia today, a penal colony is a type of correctional facility that involves forced labour and physical isolation. Former inmates and human rights activists have criticised prison conditions.

The labour colony system began alongside the Gulag labour camps in 1929 and after 1953, the corrective penal colonies in the Soviet Union developed as a post-Stalin replacement for the Gulag labour camp system.

According to the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, 585,000 prisoners were serving sentences at penal colonies in 2012, which was more than the 260,000 prisoners held in detention centres.

The basic unit of the prison is detachment. When not in the detachment, prisoners must participate in penal labour, which takes the form of work brigades in colony production zones where prisoners earn a wage, the majority of which is paid to the colony for their upkeep.