Adaptation to imprisonment in Lithuanian men's prisons

Abstract

According to the European statistics on prison population, the rate of incarceration in Lithuania is one of the highest and longest (amounting to years) in the European Union56, meanwhile, in the Western countries it consists of a few months (Sakalauskas 2007). Lithuania is also among the countries, which, in the context of the EU, had done little to improve prison conditions (Sakalauskas 2014). The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT) has recommended the country to take urgent measures to improve living conditions and security among prisoners in some correctional facilities57, and has encouraged Lithuania to review a strategy of correctional institutions' reformation. Post-Soviet countries tend to have a specific form of custodial sentence defined by researchers as carceral collectivism that also includes the architecture and organizational structure of penal institutions (Piacentini, Slade 2015). Lithuanian prisons called correctional facilities resemble Soviet-style correctional colonies with 10-20 prisoners housed in one dormitory, living in barracks and free to wander around them. Because of this form of custodial sentence in which the concentration of prisoners is high, but their contacts are poorly controlled the informal convict code is of utmost importance. This inmate code called prison subculture is universal in the country's penal institutions and serves as an essential regulatory element of convicts' daily life and interactions (Piskinaite- Kazlauskiene 2001; Petkus 2004 and 2006: Petkevičiūte 2010 and 2014).[...]