Social conditions and socio-group communities of prisoners in the pre-revolutionary Russian prisons of the end of the XIX century

The study is focused on the research of the life of prisoners in pre-revolutionary Russia. Based on various archival sources, the author designs an image of the peculiarities of the detention of prisoners in different prisons of the Russian Empire and the existing regime for monitoring prisoners. Materials not previously published have allowed the author to describe the system of supervision and organization of prisons in pre-revolutionary Russia in more detail, to analyze the issues of social security in different prisons, including such as marriage and family relations of prisoners in transit and in Siberia, and also to review the episodes of torture in prisons. The presented material is a descriptive framework that allows us to formulate assumptions about the emergence of informal communities in prisons. This study could become the basis for a detailed analysis of the historical features of the criminal subculture of the past. An analysis of the social conditions in which the prisoners were kept gives us an opportunity to understand the specifics of social interaction and the peculiarities of the formation of common behavioral types in prison. The author concludes that the emergence of informal groups of convicts and the spread of a criminal subculture across the entire territory of Russia, which is common to all prisoners, is the result of the reaction of people in isolation to conditions of detention, which universalized the rules of everyday interaction and became the basis for the formation of informal castes of convicts.