The Ukrainian regional courts, which have earlier passed capital punishment, are to revise the cases and commute the sentences to life imprisonment. On April 13, President Leonid Kuchma issued a decree confirming regulations governing such commutation. The decree specifies President of Ukraine can reduce life imprisonment to a certain prison term, to full or partial exemption from both basic and additional punishment, by replacing a sentence or the part of it not yet served with a milder penalty, or by overturning the conviction. Now there are 424 convicts sentenced by courts to capital punishment and held on death row. Ukraine’s prisons now contain 226,000 inmates, and most of them are far from being hardened criminals. Council of Europe experts, who have recently visited a Kyiv pre-trial detention unit, think it overcrowded and that most of the detainees could be could be given treatment short of custody, for the crimes they committed are not grave enough to present any substantial social danger, Interfax-Ukraine reports. That Ukraine should resort more often to noncustodial criminal punishments (fines, community service, etc.) was the subject the European experts discussed on April 12 with Ivan Shtanko, chief of the State Department for Execution of Sentences. Materials from Inna SUKHORUKOVA of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, also indicate that this is a very pressing problem for Ukraine.
“As a taxpayer, I don’t want murderers serving life imprisonment kept at my expense,” a lady said. Looking at the lady who suddenly felt she is a citizen keeping up the bureaucratic apparatus with her own taxes and so having the right to make demands on it, I thought it might be better if she applied this inspiration to peaceful purposes.
The National Television Channel One showed a spot on the Constitutional Court ruling of December 30, 1999. That ruling abolished capital punishment in Ukraine as unconstitutional. People straw-polled on Kyiv’s streets were enraged. Watching this, I kept recalling the letter of a woman whose son was sentenced to death on December 27, 1999. He pleaded guilty to several murders and rapes. The mother wrote us that her son had stated at the trial that he was innocent and he had been forced to confess under cruel torture during the investigation. The mother listed evidence in her statement that the young man was tortured, but for some reason neither the court nor the prosecutors wanted to look into this.
Why do we traditionally feel ourselves citizens and taxpayers only when it comes to condemning somebody on behalf of society?..
For some reason we traditionally consider ourselves citizens and taxpayers we are called upon in the name of society to judge something. I, for example, also want to say something as a taxpayer. By God, I do. Listen: I pay taxes, and I do not want 226,000 convicts to be kept in Ukrainian prisons on my money! This is just a bit less than our chronically cash-strapped army. I do not want the prisons to hold people who did not commit violent offenses, who are not socially dangerous, and who were convicted for minor offenses. And statistics say people like this account for over 57% of the convicts. Pretrial detention units and prisons are overcrowded, they lack medicines and are a source of tuberculosis infection. Nowadays, even prison guards run the risk of picking up this terrible disease.
And what about the prisoners who are detached from their families and have no way to support their families? We know a case when a husband and a wife, the parents of three children, were sentenced to four years for stealing 2 empty milk cans for lack of money.
We also know a case when young people were sentenced to long prison terms for stealing theodolites. Almost teenagers, they did not have the slightest idea about their value.
The life of a citizen in a totalitarian state is worth very little. In the late 1980s, the media scathingly criticized the notorious Article 86-1 which provided for capital punishment. It was abolished partially. But it still remained in the Criminal Code of Ukraine, entailing very long terms of incarceration. And who will explain to me where is the logic and common sense here? If the Constitution of Ukraine grants equal rights to all forms of property, these should also be granted equal protection! Of course, it was worse in the thirties and forties. An individual could get a ten year term for stealing a few ears from the collective farm field (or shot — Ed.) Old villagers still remember the orders of our great Leader and Teacher, the law of August 8, 1932, to which millions of collective farmers fell prey. Does anybody really think that the cruel sanctions provided for in Article 86- 1 have at least any sense? Is theft of public property so unusual? Or, maybe, somebody thinks the laws are not tough enough? Property, including state-owned, should be protected above all at the economic level. Economic prosperity will be able to cut the number of crimes against property better than any sanctions. Harsh sentences only cause no indignation if they are just.
Britain is, to put it mildly, a more affluent country than Ukraine. But the current Labor government for some reason thinks that the number of prisoners in the United Kingdom is too heavy a burden for their taxpayers. So Britain has launched a reform, the essence of which is that those convicted for nonviolent offenses have their prison service remitted and are allowed to stay at home under police supervision.
Why not do the same here? Why, in general, has our society had such a deep-seated reflex, arrest and imprison, since 1917?
COMMENT
Oleksandr KOSTENKO, chair; department of criminal law, criminology and judicial practices, Koretsky Institute of State and Law, Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences:
“In Soviet times, Article 86-1 of the Criminal Code was one of the harshest. Now criminal policy is more lenient, although Article 86-1 itself requires substantial revision. In the USSR, crimes against state property were considered more serious than those against the individual. The draft of a new code provides for the chapters to change places. Henceforth, the chapter on crimes against the individual will come first. In addition, there will be no distinction between state, collective, and individual property, which still exists as an anachronism in the current Criminal Code. These varieties of property are to be given the same status. If there still are persons who serve a term under Article 86-1, their punishment will be changed according to the new code. The only point is when this new code will be passed.”
