Grounds and conditions of granting the convict the right to move without convoy or escort

The paper is devoted to clarifying the grounds and conditions of granting the convict the right to move without convoy according to the Russian legislation. Permission to move without convoy is formally connected with the positive character evidence of the convicted, but does not determine it directly. Moving without convoy or escort primarily implies the lack of armed guards, independent stay outside prison, which is a fairly high level of benefits impossible in any other conditions of serving a sentence, even the mildest. In this regard, it actually is one of the forms of imprisonment, which provides an opportunity of quite effective training of the convicted for life their release from a correctional institution on the basis of an objective assessment of the real extent of their correction and ability to re-socialization. General regime penal colonies for male convicts have more potential of granting the right to move without convoy. These are men convicted for crimes committed by negligence, men who committed intentional crimes of little and average gravity with no previous imprisonment, and men sentenced to imprisonment for serious crimes with no previous imprisonment. Unlike male penal colonies of general regime the situation with the possibility of granting the right to move without convoy in female penal colonies of general regime is similar to the male strict regime colony, because they contain persons who committed especially grave crimes, and dangerous recidivists. Prisoners left in detention facilities or jails to perform household duties were carefully examined (during the selection process and in the course of their activities), and almost all of them can later be granted the right to move without convoy. Thus, therapeutic prisons and colonies of strict and general regime, as well as educational colonies and groups of household service at detention centers, prisons and colonies of special regime have a rather large number of convicts (from 30 to 70 %, and for the household service group - almost 100 %) potentially able to move without convoy. The grounds for granting this right, in our opinion, are a job outside the correction facility which is connected with movement without convoy or escort, and a positive character evidence of the convict; the condition is that the convicted lacks the features of the category of persons who are not allowed to move without convoy or escort outside the correction facility. This approach stems from the fact that certain legal bases should encourage the change of the legal status of the convict (which the right to move without convoy actually is), however, there must be conditions to follow in order to have such changes. The conditions may be assigned for convicts and for correctional facilities, and their execution may be compulsory for both. So, when moving without convoy, the grounds of having a job outside the correction facility require correctional institutions to give such convicts a job However, Part 1 of Art. 96 of the Correctional Code of the Russian Federation this condition is virtually non-existent, as moving without convoy is applicable in case «if t is necessary by the nature of work. Still, giving jobs to convicts seems to be an important task correctional institutions face.

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