Last week he finally got in touch with her via a fellow prisoner’s phone, but the woman still hasn’t been notified through official channels.

One woman in the Orenburg region bordering Kazakhstan recounted that she spent nearly three weeks looking for her husband after he was moved to a different prison on April 1. They have walled themselves off from the world so completely that prisoners are now only allowed to communicate with their lawyers - and there’s no guarantee of even that. In some cases, prison guards are working 14 days on, 14 days off. Prisons have stopped allowing in visitors or packages - even medicine - in an effort to keep the coronavirus outside their walls. Since the pandemic hit Russia last month, the penitentiary system has become nearly impossible to pierce, they say. Human rights activists and lawyers who work with prisoners say that, even under normal circumstances, Russia’s Federal Prison Service is an opaque institution. “If he gets coronavirus,” Yana, 50, said of her husband, “it’ll kill him.” Black boxes The wife of one, who asked that her last name be withheld so prison officials wouldn’t be able to determine which inmate was speaking with his spouse via personal phone, said the prisoners have not been given any form of protection. 2 in the village of Bira, which mostly houses convicts with tuberculosis. In the worst of the outbreaks, 21 prisoners and two prison guards tested positive last week in two corrective institutions in the Jewish autonomous district in the Far East, including medical correctional institution no. As of Monday, authorities had confirmed that prisoners or guards tested positive in eight prisons across seven different regions. Now, the coronavirus has spread to prisons across the country. Nonetheless, the country has not only rejected calls by human rights groups and several lawmakers to release prisoners, it has tasked 120 penal colonies with sewing masks to support the fight against the coronavirus, as cases topped 87,000 countrywide Monday morning. In Russia, which has the world’s third-largest prison population, about 10 percent of prisoners are HIV positive, while some 14,000 have active tuberculosis, according to Ksenia Runova, who researches prison health at the European University in St.

To prevent mass infections in their prisons, countries from Iran to Bahrain to Sudan have released tens of thousands of inmates.Įven before the worst global pandemic in over a century, prisoners were some of the most vulnerable populations. Human rights activists have described prisons - with prisoners crammed into tight spaces with poor ventilation - as petri dishes for the spread of the coronavirus. All asked for anonymity as they spoke to The Moscow Times using mobile phones they are not permitted to have in their possession. The men were two of seven prisoners serving time in seven different jails across Russia who described an increasingly anxious state of affairs in the country’s penitentiary system. “We are very worried,” said the inmate, who has seven years left of his sentence for assault and theft. There, a prisoner told The Moscow Times that dozens of inmates have come down with fever. In Rybinsk, another city in the Yaroslavl region along the Volga River, fear of catching the coronavirus is tangible in penal colony no. “The guards wear masks, but when they bring us out for checks they bunch us together in big groups.” “It’s impossible to keep any sort of distance from each other here,” he said. But with the coronavirus raging around Russia, July 15 feels like an eternity away. 1 in the city of Yaroslavl has less than three months left of his three-year sentence for drug possession.

Human muzzle prison