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This chapter focuses on the period after Stalin's death. It looks at the explosive uprisings in the Gulag with a particular focus on the forty-day revolt at the Kengir division of Steplag. It also examines the new leadership's policy that largely emptied the camp and exile systems of all those charged with either petty or political offenses. Before Stalin's death, no level of economic loss or amount of systemic crisis could cause a serious reevaluation of the need for this mass social institution. Yet his death almost immediately ushered in a radical change in the size of the system. The Gulag's decline was marked by fits and starts, resulted in a paroxysm of mass disobedience throughout the system, and finally the system's almost total collapse.

Contemporary penal systems have long suffered a profound crisis of ineffectiveness. Judicial statistics show a crime rate that is constantly on the rise, whether these are blood crimes or crimes of a patrimonial nature. Obviously, the chronic ineffectiveness of the penal systems cannot depend on merely one factor. In addition, it is unlikely on the one hand that all factors determining a crisis of such proportions can be known; while, on the other hand, it is highly likely that the mechanisms of the factors known are not completely understood. Hence, dealing with a combination of heterogeneous factors, both exogenous and endogenous, there can be no single solution that is able to restore the likes of the penal systems by itself. This chapter argues that cognitive neuroscience could provide useful instruments to comprehend some of the factors responsible for the ineffectiveness of the penal systems.

This chapter focuses on the majority opinion in Beard v. Banks, which constructs reading as a privilege that best serves the interests of the penal system when it is denied to uncooperative prisoners. In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas argues that the current ruling is justified because it is consistent with eighteenth-century Pennsylvania punishment practices, which isolated prisoners from the outside world by allowing no reading materials except the Bible and by denying prisoners contact with their families. The majority opinion dismisses legal cases that have found increased contact with the world conducive to rehabilitation, arguing that such findings are moot when “dealing with especially difficult prisoners.” Although the Pennsylvania prison deputy describes the policy as designed to make prisoners “productive citizen[s],” the Court's majority opinion thus conveys little faith in the possibility that these prisoners may actually become productive citizens or that reading may facilitate such a process.

This chapter provides insights into the penal subculture using letters, petitions, and lawsuits as evidence. It looks at how prisoners manipulated the material culture that was otherwise denied to them. It also considers the social networks that were shaped within the prison and their intersection with the outside world. In matching the irate reports of colonial officials with letters and petitions from prisoners, the chapter focuses on dialogical encounters between individual convicts and colonial authority, and looks closely at customary practices from the point of view of the prisoners engaged in them. It main objective is to challenge the assumption that penal labor was necessarily reformative.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book argues that the post-Stalin leadership, having inherited a massive, inefficient, violent, and corrupt penal system, engaged in a serious and substantive reforming effort bent on transforming the Soviet Gulag both quantitatively and qualitatively. In order to make proper sense of Khrushchev-era reforms in the penal sector, this book places them within three broader narratives. First, they were just one part, albeit a very important and lasting part, of an extensive reformist program instituted by Stalin's heirs and Khrushchev in particular. Second, they were part of a global postwar penal transition toward rehabilitation and greater leniency and respect for inmates. Finally, Khrushchev's Gulag should be understood within the broader context of Soviet crime and punishment, particularly in relation to the Stalin-era Gulag.

This chapter discusses the impact of Stalin's death on 5 March 1953 on the Gulag. Stalin's passing, the ensuing power struggle, and the existing reformist tendencies within the Gulag all contributed to the substantive reforms that would quickly and permanently alter the Soviet penal system. By 1960 the Gulag empire would be drastically reduced in size and economic importance. Its organizational structure would be decentralized to a significant degree. Reeducation as opposed to labor extraction would be proclaimed the top priority of the Gulag. Ultimately, the reforms of 1953–60 were just as monumental in terms of transforming the Soviet penal system as those of 1930–37. In many respects, in fact, they worked to roll back the reforms of the 1930s, which in general had made the penal system larger, more economically focused, and deadlier.

This chapter focuses on recasting the retributivism of Immanuel Kant, grounding it in his demands for civic respect and political equality. Historically, many have thought of Kant’s account of the purpose and justification of punishment for legal offenses as a paradigm example of thoroughgoing retributivism. The chapter offers a detailed examination of the justification Kant provides for legal punishment, the purposes he recognizes, the protections he demands, and the principles he enunciates to guide the structuring of a penal system. What Kant endorses, it suggests, is a modern retributivist penal theory focused on civic respect for persons as citizens, with implications not only for institutions, laws, and policies, but for citizen attitudes and commitments. To illustrate significant differences between this view and classical retributivism, the chapter applies it to the famous Miranda decision and warnings, as well as a recent case of punishment perceived to be overly lenient.

This chapter discusses how the three aims of the Gulag—economics, reeducation, and control—were restructured in the post-Stalin era. During the 1950s, the three aims of the Gulag were debated heavily at multiple levels within the penal apparatus. The orientation of change in this period was decidedly toward reeducation, with a smaller but growing movement toward increased control, but in the end a lasting commitment toward reeducation was only partially realized. Whether for lack of alternative indicators of reeducation or because of the continued emphasis on plan fulfillment, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in 1958 and 1960 reaffirmed the principle of rewarding its Gulag officials according to production figures alone.

This chapter discusses the late Soviet penal system. The early to mid-1960s was an era of idealism in the Soviet Union, fueled by rising standards of living, increased productivity, new scientific discoveries, and technological advances. There was genuine euphoria on a national scale. However, this euphoria ultimately did not translate into the penal sphere. Prisons were not closed; colonies of various regimen levels persisted; a new corps of hyperqualified personnel was not recruited; and crime remained a perpetual and serious thorn in the side of the communist vision. The Gulag did not fade away into oblivion, but remained a testament to the failure of Soviet socialism in achieving a more harmonious society.

This introductory chapter talks about how American lawmakers “got tough” on drugs, welfare, and crime. These political choices drove one of the most dramatic expansions of a penal system in world history, but policymakers did not simply increase the number and severity of penal sanctions. They also continued degrading the civic standing of those convicted of crimes, imposing limitations on their access to state benefits, employment opportunities, and civil and political rights. As lawmakers and state officials funneled more resources into the penal system, they also retrenched many social welfare programs, particularly those imagined to be serving poor, “nonworking” people of color.

This chapter focuses on the most powerful and important institution in the Gulag's new network of oversight and assistance, the Procuracy. By the mid-1960s, Khrushchev's penal system was enmeshed in a multifaceted and robust network of oversight and assistance that helped curb violence and other illegalities, promoted the reeducation of prisoners, and even supported the economic responsibilities of the individual penal facilities. In this manner the corrective-labor institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) were integrated more fully into the party-state apparatus and their surrounding communities, thereby reducing the conditions of isolation that led to abuse. Never again would the Soviet Gulag function as an autonomous empire within the empire.

This chapter assesses Khrushchev's reforms in the penal sphere. The reforms of the Khrushchev period had an important lasting effect on the Soviet penal system. This certainly holds true in terms of the Gulag's permanent reduction in size, but it also applies to the reorientation of Gulag aims and the resultant improved conditions experienced by its inmates. Although certain inmate privileges were reduced or eliminated in the early 1960s at the culmination of the “camp is not a resort” campaign, many of the most important prisoner-friendly reforms of the 1950s, such as parole and the eight-hour workday, remained. Despite certain continuities, therefore, the Gulag did not return to a state of unchecked (and even abetted) violence, grueling labor, and oppressive living conditions—the defining features of the Stalinist penal system. De-Stalinization in the penal sphere was a real and enduring legacy of the Khrushchev era.

This chapter examines the penal system regime in French Indochina. It explains that life inside the colonial prison was powerfully shaped by three factors including the conduct of the guards, the conditions of forced labor and the quality of food and health care, and these were virtually absent in Indochina. It suggests that this may be because of French colonial officials' distrust of and contempt for the indigenous prison staff and the callous indifference of the colonial state to the fate of native inmates.

This chapter discusses the campaign against the post-Stalin reform of Soviet criminal justice. Stalin's rule left behind a powerful tough-on-crime psychology among Soviet society and Soviet officialdom that proved resistant to change. The efforts of Khrushchev and his top allies in the 1950s to move the country away from the punitive justice of the Stalin era ultimately “failed to resonate” with the Soviet public. As a result Khrushchev and his peers in the late 1950s turned instead to optimism for the future as a ruling technique, a trope that was inseparably coupled with intolerance for those unwilling to move forward toward communism. In the end, therefore, even Khrushchev and most top justice officials turned against the “soft line” of justice and became caught up in a renewed campaign against various enemies of socialism.

This chapter examines the motivations behind specific plural political divisions, inscribed on the colonial landscape of the Straits Settlements, as providing the rationale for racial segregation within the colonial penal system. Evidence from colonial records and subsequent interpretations of the plural society weigh heavily on this history due to their conviction that colonial intentions were realized in the perfection of Singapore's urban landscape. This research differs, however, in its interpretation of the ends to which colonial urbanism was applied. It is argued that Singapore's penal identity tarnished the reputation of the perfect colony and intersected with efforts at containing deviant activities (gambling, opium, and prostitution) in segregated urban neighborhoods. Although identified as a native pathology by orientalist narratives, the penal system and the opium trade underwrote the economic successes of colonial Singapore.

Chattel slavery provided a model of lawful violence, against which other forms of exceptional penalty — capital punishment, solitary confinement — operated in the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As the penal system learned from slavery, so reform movements in general began to partake of the rhetoric and practices of penitentiary reform, particularly insofar as sentiment and sympathy produced a kind of lingua franca for reform, shaping debates about technologies of punishment along with those on abolition, temperance, public education, and any number of reformist efforts. The condition staged in The Blithedale Romance is a crisis of empowerment in a society organized as both democratic and sovereign. The mimetic relations instituted at Blithedale involve them in enactments of sovereignty that produce what Tocqueville calls “a stranger among us.”