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Soviet Union [USSR] Nonpolitical Crime and Punishment
The Soviet Union did not publish comprehensive crime
statistics, so it is difficult to compare its crime rates with
those of other countries. According to Western observers,
robberies, murders, and other violent crimes were much less
prevalent than in the United States. This was explained by the
large police presence, strict gun controls, and the relatively low
incidence of drug abuse. By contrast, white-collar economic crime
was extremely common. Bribery and covert payments for goods and
services were universal, mainly because of the lack of goods and
services on the open market. Theft of state property was practiced
routinely by employees, as were other forms of petty theft. In 1989
the Gorbachev leadership was making a concerted effort to curtail
such white-collar crime. Revelations of corruption scandals
involving high-level party employees appeared in the Soviet media
on a regular basis, and there were many arrests and prosecutions.
The death penalty, carried out by shooting, was applied in the
Soviet Union only in cases of treason, espionage, terrorism,
sabotage, certain types of murder, and large-scale theft of state
property by officials. Otherwise, the maximum punishment for a
first offender was fifteen years. Parole was permitted in some
cases after completion of half of the sentence, and periodic
amnesties sometimes also resulted in early release.
The Soviet Union had few prisons in 1989. About 99 percent of
convicted criminals served their sentences in labor camps,
supervised by the Main Directorate for Corrective Labor Camps
(Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh lagerei--Gulag), which
was under the MVD. The camps had four regimes of ascending
severity. In the strict-regime camps, inmates worked at the most
difficult jobs, usually outdoors, and received meager rations. Jobs
were less demanding and rations better in the camps with milder
regimes. The system of corrective labor was regarded by Soviet
authorities successful in that the rate of recividism was quite
low. Prisons and labor camps, in the views of former inmates and
Western observers, however, were notorious for their harsh
conditions, arbitory and sadistic treatment of prisoners, and
flagrant human rights abuses. In 1989 new legislation, which
emphasized rehabilitation rather than punishment, was being drafted
to "humanized" the special system. Nevertheless, in 1989 conditions
for many prisoners had changes little.
Data as of May 1989
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