Prosecutors Custody Supervision in late 1920s and early 1930s

In the 1930s the sphere of prosecutors' supervision activity in spite of its formal developing (a prosecutor started tomonitor the disciplinary practice inside prisons and law compliance by prison staff, to secure the prisoners' particular rights) wasactually narrowed because of the further widening of alternative political sentence system consisting of ITLs (Correctional LabourColonies) supervised by NKVD (Peoples' Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Severing of the Soviet punitive policy led to the abolitionof the previously existing public forms of custody monitoring. Actually, all of them stopped functioning in traditional ways asindependent public agents and were transformed to administrative organs. Prosecutors' supervision was preserved as the only form ofpublic custody monitoring in the system of common justice. The mentioned trends developed till the 1950s. The main factors providingthe prosecutions' custody supervision in this period were the USSR Prosecutors' Office Formation and Centralization, common prisonsand ITLs concentration in NKVD system, and the criminal policy change. The imminent process of prosecutors' custody supervisionactivity in the 1930s was not finished. The main reason was the appeared deficiency in law, which regulated the sphere and methods ofprosecutors' supervision. The Constitution of the USSR of 1936 and other legislation, which regulated the prosecution activity of newSoviet Prosecutors' Offices, did not settle any legal basis for prosecutors' custody monitoring. At the same time the penal, criminal andprosecution legislation of the Soviet Russian Federation lost its validity because of the USSR formation. Thus, a permanent penitentiaryreorganization, prosecutors' supervision reforming, legal regulation of custody monitoring by subordinate legislation, a wide applicationof department rule-making and the USSR Prosecutors' Office formation provided the collapse of real prosecutors' supervision till the endof the 1950s.

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