This paper introduces to punishment and society scholarship a new carceral framing of human rights in Russian prisons. Russian imprisonment remains elusive to prisons scholars and ethnographers around the world. Moreover, on the subject of prisoners' rights specifically, the scholarship is dominated by legal discourse. The empirical and theoretical scholarship that has developed over the last twenty years has argued that Russian imprisonment is exceptional in the study of world penal systems with the research seeking to gain a sense of this exceptionality through looking at the inertial legacies of Gulag penal culture on present day punishment forms. This article attempts to challenge this claim and will argue that specifically in the area of human rights, Russia has followed a not dissimilar carceral formation to Western prisons. Through an interrogation of the cultural, political and historical factors underpinning how rights are framed in Russian prisons the article suggests that human rights are operationalised as a lever for legal and penal control. This is a significant new finding in the study of Russian imprisonment because of the questions that arise around penal resilience, how rights and penal power develop through discourse and how global penal norms converge across jurisdictions.

Prison agencies around the world are reporting a rise in the use of illicit communication devices in prison. Nevertheless, there have been no criminological studies examining prisoners' online behavior. Using Russia as a case study, this paper reports findings from new research on prisoners' illicit internet use and the effects on prisoner agency and prison structure. Our main finding is that Russian penality sits at the nexus of two processes. First, penality is de-institutionalised whereby the prison, discursively speaking, is no longer fixed to a built form. Second, penality is reflexively re-territorialised by placing prisoner agency onto a third space. The paper presents a new conceptual framework of prisoners as absent, which reveals Russian penality as culturally contingent and politically resilient. The interplay between deinstitutionalisation and re-territorialisation has produced a new penal imaginary -a carceral motif for the twenty first century -in the form of a virtual world.

The inherited geography of the penal estate in the Russian Federation, which results in prisoners being sent long distances to serve their sentences, creates difficulties for maintaining prisoners' family ties. Using the results of interviews conducted with prisoners, former prisoners and relatives in the Russian Federation in 2007–2011, the article examines the patterns of contact between minors and their incarcerated parents in the context of arrangements put in place by the prison service to support the parent‐child relationship. Despite arrangements that appear positive on the surface, societal prejudice and historical practice combine with geography to militate against good outcomes.

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Represenfafions of fhe experiences of pasf and presenf Russian prisoners' women relafives in Russia are explored. The annals of Russian nafional hisfory glorify fhe handful of wives who volunfarily chose fo share Siberian exile wifh fheir husbands who were punished for fhe anfi-monarchisf uprising in December 1825. A survey of images of prisoners' v^/ives demonsfrafes how Russian culfural myfhology has promofed a powerful, sfereofypical image of fhe 'Decembrisf wife' as fhe epifome of marifal love, devotion and personal sacrifice. On fhe basis of various hisforic, liferary, documentary and Internet sources, as well as interviews with current Russian prisoners' women relafives, the formation, articulation and enduring vitality of the 'Decembrist wife' discourse in Russia is examined.