Even slaves have more rights

Belarusian convicts are about to lose the last thing they have left.

Only few have paid attention to the news that will have a direct impact on dozens of thousands of Belarusian convicts and hundreds of thousands of potential prisoners. It is not surprising: convicts can neither facebook nor tweet.

Meanwhile, the Belarusian regime is currently plotting a new vile crime against those who have already been deprived of everything. Recently media have reported about another innovation: if a convict who does a prison term (including life term) causes damage, up to 90 percent of their earnings can be withdrawn. It was sustained by the 159th resolution of the Ministry of Justice issued on October 15, 2013.

A poorly informed reader can conclude that up till now convicts received 100 percent of earnings. As a matter of fact, Belarusian convicts have always earned very poorly.

The Belarusian penitentiary system has its solid economic basis in convicts’ unpaid labor. One or several production facilities operate in almost every reformatory.

For example, reformatory No3 near Vitsiebsk where I spent about 6 months in 2011 has sewing, shoe and timber factory. The sewing factory where I was working produced padded jackets and pants for the convicts (which by the way the convicts should pay for), and it also received orders from the market. They sewed pants, jackets and overalls with labels “Ministry of Emergency Situation of Russia” and other things. The timber factory made boxes and coffins, the shoe factory made shoes, burial wreaths and some small stuff. All this production was sent with transports from the reformatory’s industrial area to clients and to the market. Obviously, the goods were not free.

Meanwhile, no norms of minimal wage or safety at work apply here, because such production sites are for ”training” or “experimenting”, which is reflected in the unpaid labor but not in the volumes of production. For example, I have recently read that political prisoner Artsiom Prakapenka earns 20 000 Belarusian rubles per month. Unfortunately, this is a typical situation for Belarusian reformatories.

I don’t think I should elaborate on the economic and technologic efficiency of such production and self-sufficiency of reformatories. Such production sites can hardly cover the upkeep expenses of one thousand convicts, but the companies that have production in industrial areas of reformatories and have access to unpaid workforce are far from poverty.

During my 5 months as a sewing factory worker I earned 20 Belarusian rubles (20, not 20 thousand). I cannot say that I was a valuable asset. On the contrary, I did my best to be as useless and even detrimental as possible. As a result, within a couple of weeks my career tumbled from sewer to cutter, then sewer assistant and finally loader. The process involved some jitters and threats, but finally I was left alone. And a loader at the sewing factory is not the same as a loader at the timber factory. Most of the time I did nothing, once a week I carried a pale of foam rubber. In other words, I was not the most diligent worker, but every day for five months I came to my working place – at 8 am for the first shift and at 6 pm for the second. And I did something. I think I earned at least for a matchbox…

Of course, not everyone could act this way. Anyway, I did get parcels with food, medicines, money to buy something in the prison store – for up to 150 000 Belarusian rubles per month. By the way, today’s convicts are denied all that and more: parcels, visits, telephone calls, even basic medical aid and many other things. They are condemned after alleged violations, and in reality – simply for remaining human beings in this difficult situation.

Convicts who have no family or whose family cannot support them for various reasons have to work for real. Many people from the outside think that convicts do nothing but chipping pieces of wood or creating an illusion of work. As a matter of fact, convicts do work hard. They have to use primitive equipment, and safety at work is mentioned only once, when a new convict puts his signature under the list of rules. For example, in the autumn 2011 former presidential candidate Mikalai Stakievich was injured at a timber factory. He hurt his arm and broke a rib. Such cases are quite frequent.

In general, the situation with the food that convicts have to consume was described in detail and without bias in Mikalai Autukhovich’s Letter From Hell. Indeed, dishes often contain far too little meat, products of low quality, expired and inedible products, fodder ingredients that should be used at fur farms etc. Only grains that are low in nutrients are used in the prison kitchen. Roughly speaking, you can fill your stomach but it won’t give you much.

Food quality can differ from one prison to another, but in general, if you are healthy and about to serve a 3-5 year long term, even with no support from the outside, you are not likely to die. You will lose a couple of teeth, destroy your stomach and vision, lay the ground for more serious health problems later in your life, but you’ll leave the prison alive. The question is, how will you shave, shower, brush the remaining teeth, what will you smoke, how will you wipe yourself? And what will you do if the term is not 3-5 years but 10-15 or more? If the court issued a payment? If you have to pay child support?

In this case, the only way to survive is to become a slave in the industrial area. Here there is no time to idle about and dream of Spartacus’ heroism.

At our sewing factory people worked as slaves bent over the obsolete sewing machines surpassing some crazy norms. After so much time in a cloud of microscopic synthetic fibers with no ventilation, the unprotected areas of their skin were covered with hideous blisters and blains. Nevertheless, they never took sick leaves or smoke breaks, and they had to work even with fever, because they couldn’t afford losing the payment. Nobody will ever know how much they actually earned for the prison administration, but after all those intricate and cynic withdrawals they got 35-50 000 Belarusian rubles. Before the crisis of 2011, it was enough to buy a pack of cheapest cigarettes, a minimal set for personal hygiene, and maybe even a piece of salted fat, some cheap chocolates or a can of condensed milk, and then try to figure how to make it last for one month. Some said that those who worked at the timber factory earned 100 or even 150 000, but I believe that the same rumor was spread about the sewing factory as well.

Such terms of payment create completely tragicomic and absurd situation, when a convict cannot file a complaint on the sentence with the observatory board because he cannot pay the fee, and it goes on for over a year. It is not unusual that a convict serving a term for a minor crime and working hard all the time with no warnings for regime violations, is not released after the first half of the term, which would be in accordance with the law, but instead serves the entire term because these 4-5 years were not enough to earn 150-200 USD needed to pay the compensation.

When convicts’ discontent with the payment reached its climax, deputy head of production of reformatory No3 came to the factory to answer their questions. He eagerly explained that the convicts should be grateful for the payment they got, because the country was in a crisis, and that even outside the reformatory people dreamt of working for this money. Eventually the conversation ended with him saying that “many of you will be here for quite a time, so you don’t have a choice”. Many people have no choice indeed.

As I have already mentioned, they take 90 percent of earnings. I was paid not 20 rubles, but 10 000 rubles – on paper. But then 9 980 rubles were withdrawn as an upkeep payment. A simple calculation shows that, while I wasn’t sentenced by the court to pay any compensation, the reformatory administration took not 90, but 99.8 percent of my earnings. So the news that 90 percent of convicts’ earnings will be taken away should not be interpreted literally. It means 90 percent and more.

The powers’ attitude to convicted pensioners is even more cynic. Only few know that convicted pensioners don’t get pension. Moreover, the payment of pensions stops long before the court passes its sentence – the moment the person steps into investigation isolation cell. According to the system, such people don’t need their pension because the state will take care of them from now on. Once again, I recommend Mikalai Autukhovich’s Letter From Hell for more information about the quality of this “care”.

The only benefit that convicted pensioners have is that they don’t have to work. BUT! Formally all Belarusian convicts have the right not to work, and they apply for permit to work at the factories completely voluntarily. As a matter of fact, the reformatory administration has powerful resources to make a convict want to work, even if he doesn’t need this lame payment. The simplest and most effective resource is the Rules of inner order that say that a convict must obey orders of the administration necessary for functioning and improving the reformatory facilities. In other words, the administration has the right to send a convict to any job on a daily basis – from shoveling snow to cleaning toilettes. This job is unpaid, and it is a violation to refuse. Several violations of this kind make a crime and lead to a prolongation of the term with a harder regimen. There are lots of other violations: too big / too small name badge, the name is spelled too poorly / with too big letters, large / small / hard / soft vizor in the cap and so on and so forth. In general, the majority of convicts try to avoid confrontations with the administration that never lead to anything good.

Basically, we are dealing with an army of slaves who have no rights and who cannot refuse from the unpaid job. It concerns convicts from prisons and reformatories of all types.

They don’t deserve better, some people say? Let me tell them something. According to my observations – and my colleagues and friends who have been to prison agree on this one – about 25 percent of Belarusian convicts have been condemned illegally, many of them have received sentences with numerous breaches that are too long for their crimes. Of course, there is a big number of unreasonably mild sentences that are normally passed to persons whom the ruling powers can relate to: thieves, murderers, rapists and others. Anyway, a conviction implies correction, not humiliating lawlessness and slavery in inhumane conditions.

Lukashenka’s regime is often blamed for using slaves: students get sent to the obligatory working place after graduation, then there is infamous Decree No9 “On additional measures for development of timber industry”, the contract employment system that puts nearly all employees in a plight is being implemented.

I believe that such accusations are a compliment to Lukashenka’s regime. Anyhow, most societies with slavery allowed slaves to have some property, house, family and sometimes even to change their owner. The situation of Belarusian slaves behind the bars is much worse, but it has happened before, for example, in GULAG.

A joke was popular in the late 90s-early 2000s: the abbreviation can be deciphered as “States Run by Lukashenka Aliaksandar Rygoravich” (Russian: Gosudarstvo, upravliaiemoie Lukashenko Aleksandrom Grigorievichem). This joke becomes more and more severe towards the end of the second decade of Lukashenka’s rule.

Aliaksandar Atroshchankau for charter97.org