Russia’s prison population has fallen to 282,000 over the past four and a half years, the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Gostev, said. The state-run Russian news agency TASS cited his remarks.
Russia held 465,000 prisoners at the end of 2021, Gostev said.
He said the decline in the number of convicted inmates held in pretrial detention centers and penal colonies was due in part to the “humanization” of criminal sentencing, including a broader use of forced labor and other non-custodial penalties.
He added that “in recent times, the work of recruiting contract soldiers for the armed forces has also had a certain influence.”
The fact that Russian prisoners were being recruited to fight in Ukraine first came to light in the summer of 2022. Initially, the effort was led by Wagner Group, including its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Later, Russia’s Defense Ministry took over the recruitment of inmates for the war.
Mediazona reported that in just two months — September and October 2022 — the number of inmates in Russia’s men’s prisons fell by 23,000. Over the course of 2023, the prison population declined by more than 54,000. It remains unclear how many of these people were recruited to fight. In June 2024, Mediazona and BBC News Russian reported that Wagner Group had recruited at least 48,366 prisoners for the war in Ukraine.
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