PAPER WITHDRAWN--Rights Consciousness in Russian Prisons and Beyond: Some Comments.

This paper explores the legal consciousness literature and considers it in the context of Russia's exceptional transition in penal punishment, which has taken place over the last 16 years. Russian imprisonment remains a much neglected area of socio-legal scholarship and it is even more surprising to note that the embedding of a rights consciousness in prisons, whereby prisoners and penal actors have become knowing, active and vocal agents of human rights in the penal system, has not been matched by debate and discussion about the doctrinal, legal and socio-cultural mechanisms through which this flows. Moreover, how a rights discourse can co-exist with the closing down of both human rights activism and penal reform under the current President Vladimir Putin requires urgent examination. In this paper, I draw on over ten years of empirical research in some 18 penal colonies across Russia and I examine data from interviews and observations, and from analytical work of both English and Russian language documentation. I offer a limited consideration of the legal consciousness terrain in the Russian penal context, but I aim to raise some questions of how rights consciousness emerges in penal settings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]