The evolution of the penal system and the penitentiary legislation development in Russia in the 16th - early 20th centuries

This study focuses on the penal policy development in Tsarist Russia. An imprisonment as a form of the deprivation of liberty first appeared in the 16th century. It was the state and private prisons in the courts of princes and great feudal lords, where criminals were placed in basements and cellars, and the monasteries, where the clergymen and opponents of ecclesiastical authority were imprisoned in the cellars and torture chambers. In the later period, there were new types of punishment when people were condemned to the galleys and penal servitude; the criminals were not only separated from society but also used as a labor force. In the second half of the 19th century, the sending into exile, which had dominated for over a century, was replaced by imprisonment. A historical analysis shows that the detention facilities arrangement is the inertial process, i.e. many pre-revolutionary correctional institutions still exist in modern Russia.