Based on an interdisciplinary approach, the study demonstrated that the issue of prison subcultures and informal prison hierarchies that produce the relevant subcultures is not a monopoly of criminology, sociology or criminal law. The study of this issue through the prism of political science is more promising since it is political science that allows us to analyze these issues from a higher perspective of national and supranational security. Informal prison hierarchies are a matter of relations of power and subordination, power struggles in prisons and a free society, and the use of prisons and subcultural prison symbols to spread political power by powerful actors, including states.
The research has led to the conclusion that the external attributes of prison subculture, which are produced and disseminated by informal prison hierarchies, in fact, only conceal the true nature of this phenomenon, where such nature is related only to the organization of the extraction and subsequent distribution of material resources by informal prison hierarchies. At the same time, such seizure and distribution of material resources are connected to gaining power in penitentiary institutions and a free society.
The experience of informal prison hierarchies in many countries shows that due to the greater openness of prisons to society and the spread of the influence of prison criminal organizations on free society, it is possible to argue that the boundaries between the concepts of “criminal subculture” and “prison subculture” are increasingly dissolving. This is especially evident in the United States, Mexico, and South America, where the concept of a “street gang” is automatically a “prison gang” and vice versa. Moreover, similar trends are also becoming characteristic of European countries due to the penetration of prison gangs from the New World into the European “market”.
The rise of informal prison hierarchies worldwide raises the issue of the “rehabilitative ideal” and its – literally – protection from the spreading influence of informal prison hierarchies and their subcultural symbols. After the “rehabilitative ideal” crisis in the 1970s, it has not yet gotten rid of the signs of marginality. The influence of informal prison hierarchies should be considered the main obstacle to implementing rehabilitation programs in prison; in many countries, this influence makes this marginality absolute.
As of today, the relations between the Ukrainian and Russian professional criminal worlds and the respective informal prison hierarchies remain those of a colony and a metropolis, where the latter is making every effort to keep the former “colony” (as well as other “colonies”) under its control, using all possible political tools, technologies and levers of influence, as a result of which Russia has acquired the characteristics of not even a police state or even a carceral state, but a prison state.
A prison state is not about the number of prisons, the number of prisoners, or the number of prison staff. It is about Russian citizens’ approval and internal perception of the idea that the state should be governed by “concepts” where a separate, sufficiently large group of citizens should be imprisoned. However, the rest of the citizens should be only “temporarily and conditionally escorted.”
The 2022 War has become a turbulent time for the years of established contacts and relations between Ukrainian and Russian criminals, including organized crime, in terms of servicing ordinary criminal business, common sales channels and logistics networks, and has destroyed them. However, the possibilities of the information society, hybrid forms of warfare, and propaganda drive subcultural influence devoid of physical borders and jurisdictional restrictions.
Russia’s formal authorities cannot but use (ignoring official state borders, customs services, and border guard detachments) these channels of penetration into Ukrainian “territory” – in the broadest sense of the word – to further support its postcolonial policy, which is becoming increasingly unsuccessful given the European and Euro-Atlantic vector of Ukrainian society, finally formed after Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine.
Since the Soviet era, young people have been used by professional criminals to recruit into their ranks. Many juvenile inmates in correctional facilities were a favourable environment for establishing a prison subculture among people whose consciousness at this age is unstable and prone to maximalist decisions. Furthermore, the network of penal colonies was the “closed social network” where the criminal world had unlimited opportunities to spread its antisocial “knowledge” and views.
Ukraine has taken many steps to limit this influence – the number of juvenile prisoners has been rapidly decreasing with changes in criminal legislation and the strengthening of the social component in working with children. That is why the criminal world lost its primary tool of influence on minors for some time. Nevertheless, with the development of social networks, whose users are minors, such a tool has been found again in an updated modern format – in the form of the AUE movement and AUE-(sub)culture.
When analyzing the AUE (sub)culture phenomenon, it should be noted that it would be a mistake to analyze this phenomenon and the corresponding movement only as a form of youth subculture, as it is primarily believed in Ukraine. Under current socio-political conditions, such a narrowed approach is a dangerous speculation. Based on the study’s results, we can confidently state that the AUE is not a subculture but a culture that is part of the national Russian culture. Moreover, it is not a component but rather the AUE culture of the entire Russian society, which, as noted above, has become accustomed to being in a prison state.
As a result, the AUE culture poses a significant threat to the values of Ukrainian society and the national security of Ukraine and the entire civilized world.
Among the main risks for Ukraine is the influence of Russian special services on the population of Ukraine, especially young people, through such tools as Russian prison (sub)culture and movements like AUE. In particular, due to the influence of Russian and Ukrainian “thieves in law“, who are fully controlled by Russia’s special services, on prisons, on organized criminal groups operating in a free society, and on youth movements, criminal influence spreads to many areas of Ukrainian life, creating an atmosphere of criminal insecurity, corruption, and stimulating the growth of crime, which is used by specific political forces to declare the ineffectiveness of public administration in Ukraine and the system of ensuring the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
It should also be noted that informal prison hierarchies can harm the general prison population of Ukrainian prisons, where such dangers are caused by the 2023 War and martial law. The War has had an extremely negative impact on the mental health of the Ukrainian population, and this applies to military personnel and civilians. On the other hand, the War has had a more than significant impact on crime rates in Ukraine. The significant increase in criminal repression in Ukraine due to the application of the criminal law formula “under martial law” has already led and will continue to lead to an even greater filling of Ukrainian penitentiary institutions with people who are entirely “accidental” criminals, but who will nevertheless be influenced by the Soviet prison subculture and its Russian version. This creates the risk of spreading the influence of informal prison hierarchies in Ukrainian prisons through an increase or at least a quantitative change in the prison population.
In addition, filling prisons with people with combat experience and who have “seen death” will lead to the emergence and aggravation of conflicts with the current leaders of informal prison hierarchies. We can predict the gradual emergence of new prison gangs among prisoners with past combat experience if their share in the prison population exceeds a certain threshold. Unfortunately, it is currently difficult to predict the best scenario for Ukraine as a whole – for prisoners with combat experience to fall under the influence of “old prison elites” or for them to create independent entities. Given the pervasive nature of the existing prison culture and the experience of incorporating some veterans of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan into the criminal world, we should expect a more likely scenario in which modern prisoners with combat experience will join the “combat wing” of the existing prison hierarchies. This may be more predictable in terms of social and political consequences. However, at the same time, the victory of this scenario will mean the preservation and further conservation of the patterns of Soviet and Russian prison culture in Ukraine.
In conditions where prison (sub)culture is recognized by state institutions and thus legalized in public discourse, this culture acquires the characteristics of both a simulacrum and a thing that exists.
On the one hand, prison culture is something against which certain efforts of the state are directed, and this makes it a part of honest discourse; on the other hand, it has the features of a full-fledged simulacrum based on the several hundred-year traditions of Russian and Soviet prison history. In this sense, the state de facto reinforces this simulacrum with every step it takes, where the object is prison culture or its manifestations, taken out of the broader social and political context. This is done by state institutions in Russia, most likely for the reasons of continuing to build the prison state and, at the same time to support the realization of imperial ambitions. Nevertheless, Ukrainian public institutions treat prison culture out of context similarly. It seems necessary to radically change the attitude towards this simulacrum – to define it as an element of, on the one hand, imperial “soft power” (albeit in a peculiar social environment) and, on the other hand, as an element of “state capture” by the criminalized part of society in the sense that prison hierarchies claim to implement certain functions inherent only to the state. From this point of view, the mere recognition of the prison subculture as a separate phenomenon, without fixing its claims to socio-cultural power and denying such claims, objectively strengthens this simulacrum and, at the same time, weakens state power. Every state faces this danger, but obviously, the weaker the state due to various circumstances, the greater the danger posed by prison culture. In this light, Ukraine, weakened by the military confrontation with Russia, is highly vulnerable to this simulacrum.
