RT Article
T1 Unlikely downsizers: The prison service's role in reversing mass incarceration in Kazakhstan
JF Theoretical criminology
VO 27
IS 4
SP 573
OP 596
A1 Slade, Gavin 1980-
A2 Trochev, Alexei
A2 Piacentini, Laura
LA English
YR 2023
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1864895160
AB Since 2000, the prison rate has declined significantly in Kazakhstan. This article demonstrates that the Kazakhstani prison service, counterintuitively, became a key advocate of prison downsizing owing to a coalescence of norms and incentives in the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, the prison service elite maintained the loyalty of rank-and-file personnel through a focus on reform to performative and quantifiable measures of penal performance – such as rankings in the World Prison Brief – while qualitative changes to the service's identity and organization remained unchanged. Prison staff remained militarized and their livelihood and professional culture continued to be independent of the existence of prisons. In conclusion, we argue that the Kazakhstani case demonstrates the need for an integrative theory of penal change that focuses on the interplay of macro-, meso- and micro-level factors in relationally shaping the norms, incentives and opportunities of penal policy actors.
K1 Post-Soviet
K1 Kazakhstan
K1 prison service
K1 agonist
K1 Downsizing
K1 prison rates
DO 10.1177/13624806231177020