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When reform occurs in prison systems, prisoner insecurity increases. One reason for this is disorganization. The disruption to informal governance structures, distributions of power and mechanisms for establishing trust causes conflicts. This paper argues that a key mechanism linking disorganization to conflict and violence is information flow. Incomplete information in interpersonal interaction marks prison settings. Informal institutions for producing certainty for both staff and prisoners emerge to overcome this. Such institutions are handicapped by reform directed at reducing informal prisoner controls. In such cases, violence becomes an information-generating activity and can substitute for reputation. The paper examines this proposition as it applies to prisoners and staff through a critical case study of radical prison reform in the South Caucasus country of post-Soviet Georgia.

This article compares visitor experiences at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the NKVD Prison Museum in Tomsk, Siberia. The museums differ in the production of authenticity in the museum experience. The Moscow museum has no direct relationship to a site of memory and therefore utilizes constructed forms of authenticity. In contrast, the Tomsk museum makes use of objective authenticity given its location in an original prison building. The museums share a stated mission to produce a cosmopolitan mode of remembering based on universal values and empathy for victims with a preventive mission for the sake of the future. The article examines original data from visitor focus groups to understand the emotional impact of these museums. The Moscow museum manufactures the atmosphere of the Gulag through interactive sensory stimulation. We found that this can meet resistance from visitors who sense that their emotions are being manipulated. We found that the Tomsk museum directly elicits strong emotional responses but responses could also include dark tourist titillation. In conclusion, we consider how these findings speak to debates around the tension between cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembering.

This article studies the decline of a long-standing mafia known as thieves-in-law in the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. In 2005 an anti-mafia campaign began which employed laws directly targeting the thieves-in-law. Within a year, all Georgia's thieves-in-law were in prison or had fled the country. This article looks at the success of the policy by investigating how Georgia's volatile socio-economic environment in the 1990s affected the resilience of the thieves-in-law to state attack. The article presents data showing that the chaos of this period impacted on the ability of thieves-in-law to coordinate activities, regulate recruitment, and protect their main collective resource—their elite criminal status. Due to this, the reputation of the thieves-in-law as a mafia drastically declined creating vulnerability. The article adds to the literature on resilience in criminal networks and the study of organized crime in the post-Soviet space.

This article compares visitor experiences at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the NKVD Prison Museum in Tomsk, Siberia. The museums differ in the production of authenticity in the museum experience. The Moscow museum has no direct relationship to a site of memory and therefore utilizes constructed forms of authenticity. In contrast, the Tomsk museum makes use of objective authenticity given its location in an original prison building. The museums share a stated mission to produce a cosmopolitan mode of remembering based on universal values and empathy for victims with a preventive mission for the sake of the future. The article examines original data from visitor focus groups to understand the emotional impact of these museums. The Moscow museum manufactures the atmosphere of the Gulag through interactive sensory stimulation. We found that this can meet resistance from visitors who sense that their emotions are being manipulated. We found that the Tomsk museum directly elicits strong emotional responses but responses could also include dark tourist titillation. In conclusion, we consider how these findings speak to debates around the tension between cosmopolitan, antagonistic, and agonistic modes of remembering.

This paper finds qualified support for the use of Skarbek’s (2011, 2014) governance theory to understand the emergence of prison gang-like groups in Kyrgyzstan, Northern Ireland and Brazil. However, Skarbek’s (2011, 2014) governance theory has little to say about how many prison gangs emerge and how they organise comparatively outside the US context. This paper argues that variation in the number of gangs and their monopolization of informal governance can only be explained by considering importation and deprivation theories alongside governance theories. These theories factor in variation in prison environments and pre-existing societal divisions imported into prison, which affect the costs on information transmission and incentives for gang expansion. In particular, the paper pays attention to the wider role social and political processes play in influencing whether monopoly power by prison gangs is supported and legitimized or not.

Georgia is the only country in the post-Soviet region where incarceration rates significantly grew in the 2000s. Then in 2013, the prison population was halved through a mass amnesty. Did this punitiveness and its sudden relaxation after 2012 impact attitudes to the law? We find that these attitudes remained negative regardless of levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, the outcomes of sentencing may be less important than procedures leading to sentencing. Procedural justice during both punitiveness and liberalisation was not assured. This may explain the persistence of negative attitudes to law. The Georgian case shows that politically-driven punitive turns or mass amnesties are unlikely to solve the problem of legal nihilism in the region.

Recent Gulag scholarship has begun to pay more attention to the lives of the common criminals of the camp system, challenging the largely negative presentation of these prisoners in the numerous Gulag memoirs written by political prisoners.¹ Mark Vincent has recently argued that the elaborate rules, rituals, and practices associated with common criminals, and in particular the hierarchies they produced, were a manifestation of prisonization, a term that describes prisoner adaptations to the deprivations associated with imprisonment—the loss of liberty, security, and sex. The unwritten rules that governed these hierarchies dictated “the most intricate details of [daily life] …

The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives. Divided into three sections, the collection first considers \"identities\"-the lived experiences of contingents of detainees who have rarely figured in Gulag histories to date, such as common criminals and clerics. The second section surveys \"sources\" to explore the ways new research methods can revolutionize our understanding of the system. The third section studies \"legacies\" to reveal the aftermath of the Gulag, including the folk beliefs and traditions it has inspired and the museums built to memorialize it. While all the chapters respond to one another, each section also concludes with a reaction by a leading researcher: geographer Judith Pallot, historian Lynne Viola, and cultural historian and literary scholar Alexander Etkind. Moving away from grand metaphorical or theoretical models, Rethinking the Gulag instead unearths the complexities and nuances of experience that represent a primary focus in the new wave of Gulag studies.