Managing drugs in the prisoner society: heroin and social order in Kyrgyzstan’s prisons

Abstract

Through the case study of Kyrgyzstan this paper argues that a rapidly increasing availability of drugs in prison is not necessarily deleterious to solidarity and inmate codes. Instead, the fragmentary effect of drugs depends on the forms of prisoner control over drug sale and use. In Kyrgyzstan, prisoners co-opted heroin and reorganized its distribution and consumption through non-market mechanisms. State provision of opioid maintenance therapy incentivized powerful prisoners to move to distributing heroin through a mutual aid fund and according to need. Collectivist prison accommodation, high levels of prisoner mobility and monitoring within and across prisons enabled prisoners to enforce informal bans on drug dealing and on gang formation outside of traditional hierarchies. We argue that in these conditions prisoners organized as consumption-oriented budgetary units rather than profit-driven gangs.

Introduction

What impact does a rapid increase in the availability of illegal drugs in prison have on prisoner society? Penological studies attest to drugs’ disruption to social cohesion, their role in the rise of gangs, decline in trust and prisoner solidarity, as well as a cause of violent conflict (Akers et al., 1974; Crewe, 2005; Edgar et al., 2003; Skarbek, 2014; Trammell, 2009). This article presents a case that deviates from these findings. Based on fieldwork in the Kyrgyz Republic, hereafter Kyrgyzstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union, the paper finds that prisoners were able to limit market competition for drugs by centralizing heroin distribution and collectively organizing its consumption. Thus, the paper argues that the deleterious impact of drugs on the cohesion of prisoner society is not a given; instead, the fragmentary effect of drugs is relative to the form of control over both drug markets and drug use established collectively by prisoners (Kalinich and Stojkovich, 1985). Kyrgyzstan is a critical case study to demonstrate this thesis. Firstly, it is situated on the heroin route north of Afghanistan. As such, it has experienced a sharp increase in heroin use since the collapse of the Soviet Union both outside and inside prison. Secondly, as a post-Soviet republic, its prisons, known colloquially as colonies, were part of the Soviet system of punishment that developed resilient formal and informal institutions of prisoner governance (Cowley et al., 2015; Kupatadze, 2014b; Rhodes et al., 2019).

The paper does not claim that any specific legacy of the Soviet penal system directly impacted on prisoner control of drug distribution and consumption. However, in conclusion, we argue that certain conditions, pertaining in Kyrgyzstan today, affect how drugs are managed by prisoners within prison. Two such conditions are first, the collectivist forms of prison life that were developed in Soviet times but have since intensified and second, the low level of staffing, resourcing and corruption within the system. These conditions enabled specific informal practices of information flow and social control to flourish. While these conditions can be found in many prison systems in the former Soviet Union and around the world, a third more unusual condition concerns the introduction of methadone treatment into Kyrgyz prisons. The introduction of state-led not-for-profit methadone distribution shifted the incentives of powerful prisoner groups towards maintaining their position as guarantors of informal order rather than expanding their drug market share.

The article will first review the literature concerning the effect of drug markets on prisoner society. Then the paper introduces the case of Kyrgyzstan and the data collection methods used in the study. The paper utilizes interview data to show how informal practices and norms enabled prisoners to diminish the deleterious effects of drugs on health and social cohesion. An analysis of these practices and norms explains how, in Kyrgyzstan, rival prison gangs, competing to sell on or govern drug markets, did not emerge. Instead, traditional prisoner hierarchies centralized drug distribution and oriented themselves to organizing drug consumption rather than increasing profits through expanding the market for heroin.

Drugs and the prisoner society

The impact of drug distribution and consumption on prisoners’ social lives featured marginally in the earliest sociological studies of prison society (Clemmer, 1940; Irwin and Cressey, 1962; Sykes, 1958). In later accounts, drugs became a more prominent part of prisoner society dynamics (Akers et al., 1974; Irwin, 1980; Jacobs, 1977). These studies saw the potential for the sale and use of contraband to subvert prisoner norms known as the inmate code. The inmate code was theorized to be a generalised set of normative and informal prescriptions for prisoner behaviour. These prescriptions emphasised honesty, dignity, keeping to oneself and maintaining oppositional attitudes to prison staff. Drugs disrupted the code leading to a perceived decline in honesty, dignity, solidarity, and loyalty.

More recent work, mainly from the US, has reinforced the notion that drugs in prison lead to a disruption of prisoners’ social order. Skarbek (2010, 2014) argued that the expansion of the drug economy and the number of drug offenders entering prison in the US had been crucial factors in the emergence of prison gangs since the 1950s. Drugs helped produce prison gangs by contributing to a decline in trust. This decline in turn produced a demand for centralized informal governance to facilitate the forms of cooperation that a decentralized inmate code cannot. Where gangs have emerged, there is some evidence that problems of violence and disorder have become more pronounced (Buentello et al., 1991; DiIulio, 1990; Useem and Reisig, 1999; Worrall and Morris, 2012). Thus, Trammell (2009) finds that in an age of drugs, prisoners value the underground economy and physical safety as much as any sense of a convict identity engendered by an inmate code.

The rise of gangs in non-US contexts has also been ascribed to some degree to the expansion of drug economies in prisons (Darke, 2018; Dias and Salla, 2017). In some cases, such as England, drugs are prevalent in prison, but highly organised prison gangs have not emerged. In this case, academic studies still reveal radical social disorganization produced by drugs. Ben Crewe’s (2005) ethnographic study of the effect of drugs on the social life of one male prison in England suggests that drugs acted as a social equalizer. This means that influence accrued to anyone, regardless of prior social status, if they had access to drugs. Power in prison belonged to those dealers who had the strongest market positions; those who demonstrated the traditional attributes ascribed to in the inmate code were usurped by others who could sell drugs. Furthermore, social organization shifted away from ethnic, regional or lifestyle identities towards orientations to heroin, creating loose, low-trust, practical and shifting affiliations (Crewe, 2005: 472).

The disruptive impact of drugs, and in particular heroin, on prisoner society has also been observed in post-Soviet countries (Kupatadze, 2014b; Symkovych, 2018; Vaičiūnienė and Tereškinas, 2017). In one Ukrainian prison, Symkovych (2018: 1097) finds that ‘an influx of drugs has corroded the legitimacy of the criminal elite and, by extension, the system of prisoner [informal governance]’. Due to drugs the inmate code has been transformed and, while loose hierarchies still exist, the most privileged positions are now occupied by prisoners who interface with the formal prison administration. Similarly, a study of prisoner informal governance in Lithuania concludes that wider transformations in society imported into prison, including rising drug use, caused the fragmentation of the prisoner society into ‘multiple group subcultures based on financial relationships and resources’ (Vaiciuniene and Tereskinas 2017: 677). Likewise, Kupatadze’s (2014b) study of organized crime in Kyrgyzstan’s prisons also finds that drug dealing had led to the commercialization of prison social life, impacting the traditional hierarchies that had existed since Soviet times.

In contrast to the above studies, Munson et al. (1973) argued that the subversion and coordination required of trafficking drugs into prison could produce community bonds, solidarity, and normative commitment among prisoners. Kalinich and Stojkovich (1985) contended, similarly, that the effect of drugs on prisoner society depended on how they were controlled and organized by prisoners themselves. Far from being a threat to prisoner society’s values and cohesiveness, drugs and contraband could in fact be manipulated by both prisoners and staff to produce a stable social system. Kalinich and Stojkovich (1985) argued that ‘the violence and fragmentation of the more modern inmate social milieu is relative to the operation and control of sub-rosa activities’ (p. 447). For Kalinich and Stojkovich, studies of the effects of drugs in prison should take a dynamic approach to understand how informal institutions respond to the increasing availability of drugs. In support of this thesis, Mjåland’s (2014, 2015) ethnography of a Norwegian prison found that illicit diversion of state-supplied buprenorphine, provided as part of opioid maintenance treatment (OMT), produced a culture of sharing. Prisoners did not deal diverted buprenorphine for profit. Instead they created mutually reciprocal sharing arrangements which reinforced communal bonds. In Norway, drug sharing emerged due to communitarian norms that were enforced easily within small but communal accommodation blocks that facilitated interaction. The blocks held prisoners from tight-knit social networks that reached outside prison. Moreover, the drugs being distributed were perceived as ‘free’ in the sense that they were illicitly diverted from state programmes.

Mjåland’s work demonstrates the need to focus on the organization of drug consumption as much as on distribution. In this vein, one theoretical study (McDonnell, 2013), which provided Soviet prisoner society as an example, argues that varied forms of consumption allow prisoners to organize in budgetary units. This concept, usually applied to households and families, shifts the focus from profit-seeking to consumption-organizing. Budgetary units are ‘any economic organization primarily concerned with the satisfaction of needs or wants’ (McDonnell, 2013: 316). They have members, not customers, and primarily engage in sharing, however unequally or equally, rather than in buying and selling (Weber, 1978: 98 in McDonnell, 2013: 318). Organizations often exhibit features of both enterprises and budgetary units. McDonnell argues that ‘gangsters’ in Gulag prisoner society exhibited a fundamental orientation to organizing consumption rather than growing profit and expanding sub-rosa markets.

As a short vignette to demonstrate a broader theory McDonnell (2013) relies on very few works of Gulag history to demonstrate the applicability of the concept of budgetary units to Gulag prisoner groups. However, the qualitative data generated and presented in this paper suggest that prisoners may indeed organize as budgetary units in certain conditions. Similar to Mjåland’s study in Norway, in Kyrgyzstan’s prisons drugs are no longer distributed through competitive market mechanisms and their consumption is communally organized. However, in contrast to Norway, in Kyrgyzstan the prison population is large and diverse. Prisoners are not necessarily incarcerated near home and they do not necessarily have overlapping social ties or shared beliefs. Thus, in Kyrgyzstan non-market drug distribution emerged through already existing centralized informal hierarchies. In Kyrgyzstan authoritative prisoners introduced a ban on independent drug dealing and the formation of exclusive prisoner groups based on ethnicity, religion or geographic origin. These bans were enforceable across prisons due to the collective conditions of the prison system. The vast majority of Kyrgyzstan’s penal institutions are colonies - open living and working zones with few and often corrupt prison staff. These conditions enable high levels of interaction, mobility and monitoring of prisoner activity.

The paper now turns to discussing the case study of Kyrgyzstan and data generation in more detail, highlighting the value of this particular case for developing a dynamic understanding of the adaptation of prisoner governance to the influx of drugs. Our use of the term ‘drugs’ in the remainder of the paper refers mainly to heroin.

Kyrgyzstan’s prisons on the heroin route north

Kyrgyzstan’s prison system includes 10,574 prisoners (World Prison Brief, 2018). Ethnic minorities, drawn from the significant groups of Uzbeks, Russians, and Kazakhs in the country, are also overrepresented in the criminal justice system (US Department of State, 2016). Most prisoners are held in prison ‘colonies’ also known as ‘zones’ (Piacentini and Slade, 2015). These colonies were built in Soviet times. While the colonies are a physical Soviet legacy the conditions within them are defined by the problems that have troubled Kyrgyzstan since independence: poverty, weak state capacity and corruption. In the colonies, convicted prisoners are held in open barracks rather than cells; prison governors place the responsibility for order mainly on the prisoners themselves. Prison staff have little presence in the zone. The Kyrgyz state is poor and fails to provide basic social services and resources to run these colonies. For instance, in 2016, the prison department’s budget could provide for only 35% of the prison estate’s needs (Public Defender’s Office of Kyrgyzstan, 2016). As a result, prisoners tend to be reliant on each other for food, support, security, and the physical maintenance of their environment. There is insufficient prison staff employed to meet the needs of those imprisoned and staff salaries are low, contributing to high levels of corruption (Cowley et al., 2015; Engvall, 2014).

Prisoners govern prison both formally and informally in Kyrgyzstan. Formal self-organization involves certain prisoners, known as communal workers (obshchestvenniki), working with prison administrations to help provide order, sanitation, education and work. Such formal self-organization (known as samoupravlenie) was inscribed into the system of prison management in the Soviet Union (Kharkhordin, 1999; Piacentini and Slade, 2015). However, in Kyrgyzstan, this formal self-organization has become ineffective and co-opted by a more powerful system of informal governance among prisoners. In this informal system, high-status prisoners known as thieves-in-law (vory-v-zakone) sit at the top of an informal prisoner hierarchy (Varese, 1998; Slade, 2016). Subordinated to them, ‘authorities’ or ‘prison leaders’ (polozhentsi) and ‘overseers’ (smotryashchie) collect information, enforce rules, and maintain order among prisoners. These prisoners belong to the highest caste (the so-called obshchakovyi or blatnoi caste). Below them, the majority of prisoners belong to a middle caste made up of regulars (poryadochnye) who live broadly according to the subcultural rules. These prisoners coalesce in the hierarchy, they live according to its rules and benefit from the stability it brings while also having opportunities to challenge it, for example in deciding who should be a prison leader in a particular colony. All these prisoners belong to an umbrella category of prisoners, fellas or real men (muzhiki) who live in a dignified way; dignity here defined according to informal rules known as the ‘understandings’ (poniatia). Outside the category of fellas are those who have broken those rules or otherwise reject them - ‘irregulars’ (neputi or gady), informants – ‘goats’ and ‘tappers’ (kozly and stukachi), and the lowest rung, the outcasts – ‘downgraded’ (obizhennye). All prisoners are affected by these informal categorizations whether or not they accept them.

The understandings prescribe appropriate behaviour for a ‘good’ prisoner, ascribe punishments, promote solidarity, and define caste distinctions. One of the most important of the rules concerns giving to a mutual aid fund of money and goods (the obshchak) collected on several levels, from single dormitories to the whole prison system. Prison administrations rarely attempt to prevent the obshchak practice. Resources from the obshchak are redistributed among prisoners. Alongside the mutual aid fund, a large market for various foodstuffs, medicines, cigarettes and drugs exist. This market is regulated utilizing informal courts (skhodki) and facilitated by corruption whereby prison staff allow goods, including heroin, to enter colonies (International Crisis Group, 2006; Moller et al., 2008).

This system of prisoner informal governance is highly centralized. For many years in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, only two thieves-in-law dominated the prison system, each one rising to prominence at different times. Aziz Batukaev, an ethnic Chechen, held informal power within prisons between 1996 and 2006. Kamchy Kol’baev, an internationally renowned criminal, dominated from 2008 onwards (Cowley et al., 2015; Kupatadze, 2014b). Cowley et al. (2015) have described this centralized system as a parallel government that sources its own forms of legitimacy due to the weakness and corruption in the prison system (see also International Crisis Group, 2006; Kupatadze, 2014b). Recent influential scholarship on prison gangs has highlighted their role in providing governance to prisoners, understood as the guaranteeing of transactions and the protection of property rights (Skarbek, 2014). Gangs provide governance only to those who possess highly exclusive membership. On this definition the thief-in-law hierarchy in Kyrgyzstan is functionally similar to a prison gang (it provides governance) but organizationally distinct in that it maintains reach across all prisons and is consolidated throughout prisoner society categorizing all prisoners within castes (Butler et al., 2018).

The stability of this consolidated informal governance system within prison was impacted by a large influx of heroin in the 1990s and the 2000s (Aidarov et al., 2013; State Drug Control Service, 2014). Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin and a quarter of this is directed along the ‘northern route’ through Central Asia, much of it through Kyrgyzstan; an estimated 90 tons of heroin passed through the country in 2010 alone (Hashimova, 2009; UNODC, 2012). Trafficking within Kyrgyzstan is monopolised in different regions by politically connected criminal groups creating what Kupatadze (2014a) has termed a ‘virtual narco-state’. Due to its location on one of the world’s major drug trafficking routes, the Central Asian region has one of the highest rates of injection drug use in the world, mainly of heroin (DeHovitz et al., 2014). About 1% of the population in Central Asia injects heroin and this can be as high as 10% along the major trafficking routes (UNODC, 2012). In Kyrgyzstan, there are an estimated 25,000 people who inject drugs (UNAIDS, 2012).

According to a representative biobehavioral survey of prisoners in Kyrgyzstan, more than a third report having injected drugs in their lifetime. The prevalence is likely much higher given that half the prison population is infected with hepatitis C, which is generally transmitted through injection drug use (Azbel et al., 2016). Figures for drug use vary across prisons; in prison number 31, a ‘strict regime colony’ for recidivists ‘an estimated 7 out of 10 inmates inject drugs while inside’ (Latypov et al., 2014: 1159). Launched in the community in 2002 and in prisons in 2008, methadone treatment in Kyrgyzstan offers daily doses of liquid methadone (an opioid agonist) at specialized clinics to opioid dependent patients. Yet, uptake remains significantly below internationally recommended levels (Kim et al., 2014; Mansfeld, 2014).

The conditions in the Kyrgyz prison system, where a highly developed system of informal prisoner governance was impacted by a sudden influx of heroin, provide a critical case study to examine the question of how drugs impact prisoner society. The paper now provides a description of the methods used to generate the data that the claims in the paper rely on.

Methods

The analysis in this paper draws on data from two qualitative research projects. The first project investigates the impact of prison reform on social life and informal governance in former Soviet prisons across four countries, including Kyrgyzstan. The second project investigates the lived experience of drug use and addiction treatment in Kyrgyz prisons. Both projects involved in-depth interviews with current and former male prisoners. The former project purposively sampled 19 respondents with prison experience across time periods from the 1980s (n = 4), 1990s (n = 8) and 2000s (n = 12). Some respondents had been in prison in more than one decade. The latter study sampled respondents in prison (n = 40) with a history of drug injection, imprisonment, and, for some, methadone treatment participation; most were recidivists with a long history of incarceration throughout the 1980s to 2018. These interviews enable a comparison of narrative accounts of social life and drugs across time periods to understand changes to informal institutions as regards drugs. All interviews were anonymised and the paper uses pseudonyms when citing respondents.

In both projects, interviews were conducted in a private setting. In prisons, participants signed informed consent after meeting one on one with the authors to explain the study protocol. It was highlighted that the study was not related to the work of the prison administration, all data would be anonymized and kept confidential. Moreover, prison personnel and other prisoners were absent from the interview room which was away from the residential areas of the prison. Narratives concerning informal governance, violence and drug distribution came up inductively out of questions that targeted issues of social trust, support, friendship, individual drug use, and health.

There are a number of limitations to the methods in this study. The sampling was purposive, involving snowballing techniques and the assistance of prison administrations for accessing prisoner respondents. The study only samples adult men. Interviews touched on sensitive issues surrounding power in prison, violence, illegal activity and drug use that respondents might not easily talk about or where they might have an incentive to mislead. Direct questions about caste status were not asked as this could be an insensitive and potentially upsetting question and, although some respondents volunteered this information independently, we do not include informal status when quoting participants. Accounts of past experiences in prison can be impacted by recall bias, particularly among those experiencing traumatic or difficult experiences. Moreover, researchers on both projects were Russian-speaking outsiders and this might affect the type of responses given and the levels of openness of participants.

In response to these concerns, the projects aimed to generate sufficient interview data to increase the probability that responses reflected prison life. To generate this data, both projects attempted to find respondents through embeddedness within prisoner and ex-prisoner networks during extensive and repeated fieldwork periods, taking as much time as needed to establish trust within these networks as well as with each individual respondent. Researchers rigorously checked interview data against each other with the use of qualitative data software programs and drew where possible on secondary sources and interviews outside the prisoner and former prisoner population to corroborate findings. Both studies included interviews with experts, policy-makers, prison staff and participation in meetings of civil society bodies including prison monitoring committees.

The accounts of prisoners and former prisoners in our interviews consistently described informal rules and practices that were vital for managing the impact of drugs on prisoner society. The centralization of drug distribution (known as razgon) is the most basic form of control over drugs and we turn to this next. However, this centralization was only possible due to prisoner communication and enforcement of informal rules about drug use that we subsequently analyse: a punishable ban on independent drug dealing, the monitoring of prisoners through free movement of the highest caste within prisons and established means of information transmission across prisons (khod and progon), and the regulation of social group formation (blok). These rules and practices enabled the centralization of drug distribution through reinforcing existing hierarchies and disincentivizing the formation of separate drug dealing gangs.

Regulating heroin distribution and consumption

Studies from the US (Sevigny and Caulkins, 2004; Skarbek, 2014; Trammell, 2009) conceptualised drugs as a commodity sold and bought on a growing market within prison. Similarly, in Kyrgyzstan, Latypov et al. (2014) described a market controlled by the highest caste and expanding to all sections of the prison. Kupatadze (2012, 2014b) also found that profits from the drug trade in Kyrgyzstan determined dominance, and that prison represented an excellent market for heroin. Our interviews, however, suggest that, control over the distribution, sale, and use of heroin was governed less by the logic of the market and more by a logic of communal consumption and redistribution.

In line with the studies of Latypov and Kupatadze, it is true that drugs had been sold as a commodity in Kyrgyzstan’s prisons throughout the 1990s and 2000s through within-prison markets known as bazaars, where prisoner-dealers sold heroin and sent a percentage of their profit to the prisoner mutual fund, the obshchak, run by the highest caste in the hierarchy. As Yevgenii, who was incarcerated at the time of the bazaars, explained anyone with financial resources was able to purchase drugs: ‘what was important was to have money, you didn’t have to work, if you had money, please, sit at home [the prison barrack], they’ll bring it to you at home, what mattered was money.’ However, the use of bazaars and the emphasis on individual profits at the expense of health and social order created consternation:

[W]hen money started flowing, some turned a blind eye, let everyone go get it [heroin], as long as money is flowing… the middle caste [poriadochnye] started [injecting]… And then…they are, as they say, they became lower caste [gady] they were stealing from their own people… they became weak in spirit. (Yevgenii, 53)

In 2008, this drug market was curtailed when a thieves’ directive (known as progon – see next section) decreed that the bazaars were to be closed and that the independent selling of drugs would be banned. All heroin entering the prison became pooled and controlled by the highest caste instead. To replace the bazaar, heroin was incorporated into the prisoners’ mutual aid funds. The distribution of the drug was managed via a ritual distribution of resources known as razgon, a handout. The handout starts first with collection (grev) for the so-called people’s fund (luidskoi obshchak). The collection occurs regularly on Fridays across all prisons and is considered voluntary. Overseers of the fund record the amounts (whether financial or in kind) paid in by individuals. The overseers pool the resources and buy needed goods. These goods are then distributed among the prisoners. The ostensible aim of the fund is to help those most in need. Thus, respondents reported that subsequent pay-outs from the fund were not necessarily commensurate to the amount paid in. Those in particular need were given more, either as charity or on the understanding that they then had a general debt to the fund.

Heroin is also handed out through this ritualized distribution. Yet, it can only be purchased and then redistributed with resources from a special fund controlled by the highest caste. This fund is known as the thieves’ fund (vorovskoi obshchak). The resources in this fund are replenished, in part, through prisoners’ labor. Prisoners (almost exclusively from the middle caste) make wood-carved goods and other products that are then resold outside prison. For this, workers are rewarded on request with a daily dose of one mL of heroin, which is pre-mixed such that the concentration is unknown. For the rest of the prisoners, heroin is distributed on request on the tenth day of the month, also one mL each time. The amount of heroin received is unrelated to one’s contribution into the people’s fund. For both drugs and other goods then, reciprocity is generalized, rather than specific, and receiving heroin is not a straightforward financial or barter transaction.

Centralized distribution has produced timetabled communal consumption. This organization of distribution and consumption of heroin is stimulated by an apparent incentive to maintain traditional hierarchy and social order rather than achieve market expansion. This interpretation of prisoner incentives is supported by three findings in the interviews: that centralized heroin distribution is interpreted as a form of harm reduction; that punishment exists for encouraging young newcomers to inject; and that there is exclusion of those who choose methadone treatment instead of heroin from the heroin handouts.

Firstly, while a contingent of prisoners were opposed to the closing of the bazaars saying that the heroin currently available is not enough, many respondents reported that they perceived it as a way to reduce harm. Pre-mixed heroin from the prisoner fund is seen as safer than that obtained by other means, often called ‘illegal,’ or that obtained in the days of the bazaars. As one respondent put it regarding the centralized heroin distribution, ‘there’s no danger from the prisoner fund [obshchak] at all, especially since the handout [razgon] is done to save people from dying, right?’ The language used to describe centralized heroin distribution is one of either ‘for the good of the people’ or, commonly, as medical treatment:

[The handout] doesn’t let them go through withdrawal… because you know that the third, fourth day [without heroin] a person begins, he shakes terribly…so you get the handout [razgon] and you feel better. (Alim, 37)

This form of ‘harm reduction,’ is welcomed by prisoners. ‘They add more water, naturally, to avoid overdoses,’ said Barat, 37. When receiving one’s dose from the handout, the overseer of the prisoners’ fund will make sure that each participant has a clean syringe, especially if he is aware they have HIV.

Secondly, independent heroin selling is further discouraged by blocking the cultivation of new users. For example, strict rules protect new prisoners and govern against initiating them on heroin:

If you’ve started injecting, let the overseer know that you’ve started. And if an 18-year-old comes to him and says he’s started injecting, he’ll ask, “Who injected you? Where did you inject?” and even, “What time?” If it turns out that I’m his [dormitory mate] and I’ve injected this 18-year-old, that’s it, they’ll break me to pieces for this. They won’t even talk about it first. Because you never initiate a young person on heroin. This gets a very serious response according to the understandings [prisoner code]. (Nurlan, 51)

As Nurlan notes here, even the timing of the injection is of interest to those controlling heroin. This suggests the collective organization of heroin consumption is just as important as the centralization of its distribution, following the logic of a budgetary unit more than that of a profit-expanding firm.

Finally, the parallel opioid maintenance program, methadone treatment, run by the formal prison administration, opened up potential competition for the prisoners’ heroin handout. When the methadone treatment program was in its early stages, the highest caste decided that methadone patients would be effectively excluded from the heroin handout. ‘Well, if a person has already chosen treatment, why help him again?’ one respondent remarked. Most of the participants on methadone treatment occupy the lower prisoner caste. Prisoners do not lose their hierarchical position upon joining the methadone program but their social status is nonetheless diminished. As a result, methadone treatment has remained highly unpopular among prisoners and many prefer to remain dependent on the prisoner heroin handout, rejecting formal treatments and remaining a member of the fellas – a ‘true’ member of prisoner society.

The closing of the bazaars was most often framed by respondents as an effort to realign prisoner practice with that of the prisoners’ code. The logic of markets and market expansion is missing. The centralized distribution mechanism is not directly dependent on the resources available to the consumer but on a range of personal and collective factors. The goal here appears to not be profit but social control through a reinforcing of prisoners’ allegiance to the code as well as through ritual communal consumption and a hardening of informal hierarchical boundaries. How was the centralization of heroin distribution possible? The next section explores the rules and practices that facilitate the operation of this system of drug distribution and consumption.

Enforcing the centralization of heroin distribution

For the centralization of drug distribution to be operational, rules concerning drug use must be both clearly communicated and enforceable. In Soviet times, the code of honour known as the ‘thieves’ understandings’ was an unwritten set of rules that prisoners lived by in the Gulag (Galeotti, 2018; Varese, 1998; Slade, 2013). In Kyrgyzstan, respondents reported that these rules went through written codification and were presented as a set of directives from the top of the prisoners’ command structure in the 1990s and 2000s. A notepad in each cell of the main remand prison in the capital city of Bishkek laid out the rules proceeding from five general principles of behaviour down to specific types of infractions and their corresponding punishments. As one respondent, incarcerated in the Bishkek remand prison in the 2000s, explained:

Everything is written out completely in the notepad, what you have to do. You study this in the remand centre, you come in as a young person. So, when you go into the [prison] colony, you already know. It is hard to live by those rules. But if people always followed those rules, we’d all live fantastically. There is real order, real order in there [the remand prison]. (Rustam, 32)

Writing out criminal ‘constitutions’ concretize hierarchical positions and their attendant rights and obligations, establishing consensus over what is and what is not acceptable behaviour, disincentivizing cheating, and defining not only the rules but practices of enforcement of those rules (Leeson and Skarbek, 2010; Skarbek, 2008). The writing of the rules in Kyrgyzstan emerged during the initial influx of heroin when social relations were changing and the demand for clarity about right and wrong in terms of behaviour on new illicit markets was high. New rules were distributed as written directives (known as progon) through the prison system, coming from the highest caste leaders. A number of these rules and directives explicitly impacted on the distribution and use of drugs: the outlawing and punishing of independent dealing; a requirement to maintain monitoring and information transmission through defined practices including the free movement of the highest caste within prison; and the outlawing of the creation of geographically or ethnicity based prisoner groups. Below, the distribution, monitoring and enforcement of these rules are analysed.

As mentioned in the previous section, in 2008, a directive was produced by the highest caste that ‘criminalized’ the independent dealing of heroin and centralized all heroin distribution through the prisoners’ mutual aid funds. The directive, according to our respondents, was related to concern over the degree of heroin addiction in prison and the disorder that had ensued. Successful dealers were a threat to the traditional prisoner hierarchy. Because of this, the rule outlawing independent drug dealing was enforced by the highest caste through demotion down the hierarchy. Demotion entails the loss of rights and privileges and increased probability of victimization by other prisoners.

This one guy made out he was a first timer but actually he had been inside before and he had been selling drugs in prison–and if you are a dealer [baryga] then you are an irregular [neputi; second to lowest caste]–in the beginning he told us he didn’t know he couldn’t sell drugs but of course he knew. (Asset, 36)

Claiming ignorance of explicit, written rules could be no excuse in this case. The dealer was demoted. Asset continued that in accusing this prisoner of being a dealer ‘you have to have the evidence; you can’t just go after someone–there was a group of guys who could confirm it [that the prisoner in question had been a dealer] for us.’ How was this monitoring of individual behaviour produced so efficiently? Respondents reported that control over drug distribution and consumption was produced in part by the mobility of high caste prisoners within prisons. Respondents referred to this as free movement [khod]. Some respondents contrasted free movement to living under a ‘regime’, where the space and tempo of prison life is determined by the prison administration. In Kyrgyz prison colonies, due to low levels of staffing, corruption and underfunding, prisoners may move between areas of the colony. In Soviet times, such movement was restricted and prisoners stayed localised in sectors, this changed in post-Soviet times:

When we were inside … there was no regime whatsoever… In the Soviet period they had the local sector walls, but when we were inside they just didn’t exist, so there was a mutual agreement between the staff and prisoners: you can’t stop free movement. Whatever we have gained from the trash [administration] they can’t take back. Because if they do, we will ask the prison leader [polozhenets] straightaway - how have you allowed that to happen? To take away what we had? (Ruslan, 32)

As this respondent alludes to, the prison leader has a responsibility to establish free movement. Prisoners are divided up into ‘families’ [semeiki] of four or five people and live in ‘detachments’ [otryady] of 20 or 30 people within dormitories based in military style two-floor barracks. Several dormitories make up a local sector. Each detachment has an overseer that reports to the prison leader of which there is one in each colony. Due to free movement, no family, detachment or sector is free from monitoring by any other prisoner. Free movement thus allows prisoners to monitor the distribution and consumption of drugs in all areas of Kyrgyz prisons. This includes specifically segregated zones used for TB and methadone treatment. Latypov et al. (2014) write that mobile prisoners engaged in distributing heroin routinely breached segregation measures. It was ‘not heroin use per se, but the distribution system of heroin [that] resulted in structural breaches of the TB separation measures’ (Latypov et al., 2014: 1159–1160).

The ubiquity of illicit mobile phones in the system lowers the costs considerably on monitoring across prisons. Even where phones are not accessible, informational notes (maliavy) are sent out across the prison system to gather information on individuals.

‘When they transfer someone [from one prison colony] to remand, all the notes [maliavy] get sent through with them and then whoever is being sent out from remand [to a different colony], my note goes with them….[the response] takes 10 days, sometimes two weeks … the note gets answered and sent back with the next transfer [etap].’ (Mirlan, 60, Bishkek)

The greater the reliability of the information that the highest caste collects about breaches of the rules the greater certainty among prisoners that punishments are fair (Lessing and Willis, 2019). Reliably informed prisoners are more confident that it is right to shun or punish a breaker of the prisoner code. In Kyrgyzstan, the punishments for rule-breakers often involve a form of ostracism through status demotion. Physical punishment can only be enacted with the permission of the highest caste. Those high up the hierarchy are in no way insulated from demotion and have an incentive to be proportionate and fair. The middle caste, by far the most numerous in number, can place pressure on prison leaders by signalling dissatisfaction to other leaders in the prison system through the same communication mechanisms as those described above.

A final informal rule that impacts on drug distribution and consumption concerns social group formation (blok). The term blok refers to any group of prisoners that excludes others based on a common identifying feature. These features can be ethnicity, religion, geographic origin or attitudes to and use of drugs. Blocs are considered a threat to the principle of subordination to the prisoner hierarchy. Prisoners are encouraged to organize socially according to their hierarchical caste, sometimes called ‘suits’ (as in cards). This is not unique to Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet Union by any means. For example, Peshkov (2015) finds a similar dynamic in which there is suppression of ethnic identity in favour of criminal subcultural belonging among prisoners in Eastern Siberia. In Kyrgyzstan, blocs were banned by the year 2000. Punishing the formation of blocs prevents the potential establishment of gangs outside the centralized hierarchy.

Blocs are unthievish [blyatstvo] in prison… if you have three, four, five guys from Pokrovka [a region of Bishkek] who want to get together for example, that is a bloc. If that’s the case, they’ll reach out from the high caste and say “what’s this with you five?” …[O]nly [organize] by the understandings… We live in suits, not by regions but by suits [ne po oblastiam, a po mastiam].’ (Zaur, 35)

This is not to say that regional and ethnic identities played no role in social life. Prisoners from the same region helped each other and lived together in prisoner families (Pallot et al., 2012; Slade, 2016). However, these families could not draw exclusionary boundaries based on geographic or ethnic identities or agitate for group interests. As such, the colonial language of Russian, understood by the majority of Kyrgyzstani citizens regardless of ethnicity, was used as a lingua franca to ensure smoother communication of the rules:

You end up inside and there are Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Russians and many nationalities and you need a common language and they made that Russian. If there is a thieves’ court [skhodka], it is in Russian not in Kyrgyz. It’s accessible to all. If someone talks to you, you can ask them to be kind enough to say it in Russian. (Rustam, 32)

The relationship between bloc formation and drugs was drawn by several respondents. Given the diversity of the prison population and the strong regional identities present in any given prison, access to drugs could empower groups that organize outside the traditional hierarchy. In particular, regional groupings from areas of the country where access to drugs was higher could create strong challenges to the distribution of power in prison. For example, more heroin passes through the city of Osh in the south of Kyrgyzstan than any other region of the country (Kupatadze, 2012). Osh has an Uzbek majority. The city was the site of ethnic rioting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in 2010. Control over the drug trade might have been one of the causes of these violent clashes (Kupatadze, 2012). Respondents noted that prisoner society went to great lengths to prevent disorder happening inside prison at that time:

I was in with Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, and we were breaking bread together, no conflict in the strengthened regime prison [usilinka]. And outside at that time [2010], there was a war, Kyrgyz on Uzbeks, and they [the Uzbeks] thought we might also start.… Anyone who was not Kyrgyz was scared [that] what was happening in Osh could spread, but in the zone there was no conflict. You see, unity in the zone. Unity. (Timurbek, 62)

Drug practices in Kyrgyz prisons today also reproduce hierarchical, rather than ethnic, boundaries. In 2014, 41% of prisoners were ethnically Kyrgyz and a third were Russian; ethnicity was not correlated with a lifetime history of injection drug use (Azbel et al., 2016). The new rules introduced in 2008 regarding reorganizing drug sale and use distributed drug practices along hierarchical lines. The prison leaders and overseers were banned from injecting heroin creating a trend toward greater health in the prison, especially among the highest caste, who are often referred to as athletes (sportsmen):

The sportsmen they go work out in the gym… they lead a healthy life in terms of their eating habits and their workouts. There are more sportsmen now because the young people, they’re not using drugs like they used to; it’s harder to get drugs. So they’re turning more to sports … And those [of the highest caste] who do inject, they’ll catch them and beat them, to be honest. (Nikolai, 49)

This has relegated drug use to all the other castes. But this is not without its own gradations; drug use practices are largely determined by one’s position in the hierarchy. The middle caste has the most access to heroin while the lowest castes are more likely to access methadone treatment. In prisons for first time offenders and in some other prisons, none of the middle caste is accessing methadone treatment while in prisons for repeat offenders, only 20% of all methadone patients are in the middle caste. Instead, in these prisons, more than half of the middle caste inject heroin. Thus, the prison caste hierarchy has remained the dominant form of social organization. It is a significant factor in determining who in prison injects heroin, who abstains from it, and who uses methadone treatment.

Conclusion

The case study of Kyrgyzstan provides support to Kalinich and Stojkovich’s (1985) thesis that drugs per se are not deleterious to prisoner solidarity and inmate codes. Instead, the fragmentary effect of drugs is relative to the forms of control prisoners can exert over drug distribution and consumption. In Kyrgyzstan, prisoners co-opted heroin and reorganized its distribution and consumption through non-market mechanisms. In doing so prisoners reinforced existing social order. This finding is further evidence, building on the work of Mjåland (2014, 2015), that drugs in prison are not always distributed through dealing on a market. The concept of budgetary units - fundamentally oriented to organizing consumption rather than expanding market share - is applicable to Kyrgyzstan’s prisoner hierarchies. In explaining the forms of drug exchange in prison and their impact on social order Mjåland (2014) argues that we should pay attention to local conditions. In Norway, strong overlapping social ties and norms among prisoners, the communal design of prison regimes and accommodation types, and the provision of opioid maintenance treatments all impacted the form of control that prisoners exerted over drugs (Mjåland’s, 2014: 349).

In Kyrgyzstan, these variables were also relevant. On the one hand, in contrast to Norway, in Kyrgyzstan prisons and the prison population are large. Prisoners are diverse and not necessarily tight knit, nor incarcerated near to home. On the other hand, Kyrgyzstan’s prisons house prisoners in collective accommodation with high degrees of contact with each other within and across penal institutions. These collective conditions have produced highly developed informal institutions for managing social relations. Information about individuals flows quickly even where prisoners do not have many overlapping social ties. The ease of knowing past behaviour and monitoring present behaviour in the Kyrgyz system places pressure on prisoners to conform to communal rules and adopt shared prison-based identities. Moreover, within prison colonies prison staff are few in number and work in a high corruption context. Prison administrations find it in their interest to actively support the prisoner system of informal governance to both maintain order and as a source of economic rent. Prison staff support enhances authoritative prisoners’ capacity for social control and their ability to punish breaches of social norms (Butler et al., 2018).

Due to these conditions, the prisoner hierarchy was able to enforce bans on drug dealing and on the formation of exclusive groups based on ethnicity or geography. Though, in contrast to Norway, this control over drug dealing was unlikely to have been produced by, nor aimed at, a culture of sharing or communitarianism. Instead, in Kyrgyzstan, in the first instance at least, control over drugs aimed at maintaining an informal hierarchical system of social relations that benefited some prisoners more than others.

The presence of opioid maintenance treatment is a final variable that appears to have had unintended consequences in both Norway and Kyrgyzstan, leading to drug distribution by non-market means (Azbel, 2020; Mjåland, 2014). We have seen no evidence to suggest that methadone is illegally diverted from state programs by prisoners in Kyrgyzstan. As such, prisoner leaders had to compete against a secure and state-funded supply of methadone. In response they began to distribute heroin based on need and ostracised those that chose to use methadone. To manage a needs-based distribution mechanism, prisoners maintained a system of generalized reciprocity through a mutual aid fund and structured consumption communally. This way of organizing heroin produced normative commitment to the informal hierarchy among many prisoners often regardless of caste position. These prisoners formed consumption-organizing budgetary units that perceived control over heroin as harm reduction that protected health and social order.

Biography

Gavin Slade is an associate professor of sociology at Nazarbayev University. His research explores the effect of prison reform on prisoner societies with a focus on the former Soviet Union.

Lyuba Azbel, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale University School of Medicine. Her research uses qualitative methods to explore the social dynamics of drugs use in prisons.