Legal basis for involving persons deprived of liberty in labor in the Russian empire

The first prisons for holding those sentenced to punishments involving imprisonment began to appear in the Moscow state only in the 17th century, but at that time the issue of their targeted involvement in labor had not yet been raised, and it was only a question of sending those sentenced to exile to remote places to implement the task of developing new annexed territories. In the era of Peter I, the situation began to change, and since then, during the Russian Empire, the state began to determine this aspect of penitentiary policy. The article reveals the main trends in the legal regulation of the labor of convicts held in places of imprisonment in the 18th-19th centuries. It is noted that at different stages of the history of the two centuries, approaches to the employment of convicts were different. Thus, in the era of Peter the Great, this issue was regulated by decrees of the emperor, who sought to use the cheap labor of convicts, and above all convicts, to the maximum extent possible to solve the economic problems of the state (the construction of fortresses, bastions, and other objects), which corresponded to his grandiose reformist plans. Then the intensity of the employment of convicts decreased, as did the corresponding legal regulation. From the beginning of the 19th century, full-fledged legislative acts began to be published in this area, regulating the penal system, which established the features of attracting exiles to hard labor, and first of all, we are talking about the Charter on Exiles of 1822, which, due to its fundamental nature, is given special attention. Later, corresponding norms also appeared in relation to those held in prisons and other penitentiary institutions. By the turn of 1900, the legal norms that determined the procedure for the labor use of convicts generally corresponded to the international positions that had developed by that time in this area of public relations.