Foreign experience of overcoming the language barrier in prisons

Introduction: to date, about 4 % of convicted foreigners and stateless persons are serving their sentences in Russian correctional institutions. This category of convicts still remains without proper attention. In 2020, correctional colony No. 22 in the Republic of Mordovia, known as the “prison for foreigners”, was even converted into a correctional center, and foreign convicts were redirected to other institutions. Thus, the problems remain relevant of the legal status, optimization of means and methods of achieving the goals of punishment, re-socialization, post-penitentiary adaptation or reintegration into society of convicted foreigners and stateless persons. Materials and Methods: the basis of the research is the legislation of some European countries (Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, etc.) and East Asia (China, South Korea and Japan), scientific research by foreign authors in the field of observing the rights and legal interests of foreigners in places of detention. The methodological basis is formed by general scientific and specific scientific methods: analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, correlation, expert assessments. The results of the study: the authors came to the conclusion that the realization of the rights and legal interests of foreign convicts in places of deprivation of liberty directly depends on the correct delivery of information about the procedure for serving sentence, as well as on the real possibility of address convict orally or in writing. The research identified the most promising ways to overcome the language barrier in places of detention from the practice of penitentiary systems in some countries of Europe and East Asia, and also considered the possibility of using such experience in the activities of institutions of the Russian penal system. Findings and Conclusions: the authors have selected proposals for improving the activity of correctional institutions in terms of overcoming the language barrier in the sentence enforcement in relation to convicted foreigners, namely, the use of a reference book for convicts foreign citizens and stateless persons who have little or no command of Russian (in diagrams and images), which will be contain the main extracts from the Penal Code of the Russian Federation and the Internal Regulations of Correctional Institutions, and the materials of the reference book can be translated into the most common among convicts languages.