Russia's Prison Population Drops 40% to 282,000 Since 2021

The number of prisoners in Russia has dropped by more than 180,000 over five years to 282,000, the head of Russia's penitentiary service said on Thursday. Arkady Gostev stated that at the end of 2021 there were 465,000 prisoners. That represents a decline of nearly 40 percent.

Around 85,000 of the current prison population is held in pre-trial detention, he added. Gostev said the decline was driven in part by the army's recruitment drive of convicts. In four years of war, Russia has offered prisoners army contracts to fight in Ukraine and buy out their sentences, should they survive.

The penitentiary chief attributed the rest of the drop to more suspended sentences and other forms of punishment. Thousands of prisoners were working on production sites in support of the army, Gostev said. Over the course of the year, authorities additionally deployed 16,000 inmates for manufacturing purposes tied to the military.

5 billion rubles (€64 million). Russian prisoners are often made to work in a system inherited from the Soviet Gulag.

Prisoners returning from the Ukraine front have led to an increase in crime and social tension in Russia. Russia has experienced a shortage of workers during its offensive, with hundreds of thousands of men at the front and a similar amount fleeing the country due to mobilisation.

Russia, which has a massive prison network inherited from Soviet labour camps, has one of the world's largest convict populations, though that number has been decreasing in the last 20 years.