Arman Danielyan

“Civil Society Institute” NGO President

The main issue of early conditional release within the RA Penitentiary system roots from Soviet system. In general, issues of the law enforcement structures are common for the countries of the region. However, each state is looking for its own way to solve them.

The penitentiary service has inherited from the Soviet system a two-level system of early conditional release: the administrative commission of the penitentiary institution (hereinafter administrative commission) and the court. If the administrative commission decided that the prisoner is corrected, it used to send a motion to the court. If the court issued a positive decision, the prisoner was released.

It has to be mentioned that the administrative commission as before and now is chaired by the head of the penitentiary institution. This means that other members of the Commission (his/her subordinates) have the advisory role and their participation is rather formal as the decision is made by the head of the institution. At the same time, if we add the issue of the inconsistency of the judicial system, it appeared that the system of early conditional release is totally corrupted: each prisoner knew whom and how much to pay to be early released.

The system worked “effectively” and about 90 percent of the prisoners were granted the early release. This probably means that the “service” was accessible for the majority of the prisoners. Certainly, with respect to some prisoners the provided services were taken into account and they could make a use of “charge free system” but the number of these prisoners had no serious impact on statistics.

At some point, this situation started to irritate certain structures (presumably the Police who would not like the criminals whom they catch, served only a small part of the sentence and were released on mass scale). Consequently, the Police decided to start a fight against the corruption (surely in the realm of early conditional release only. The other sectors of the penitentiary system were no less corrupted but it had not irritated anyone).

Thereby, in 2006 the independent commissions on early conditional release were established (hereinafter the independent commissions). Three commissions for 12 institutions, i.e. each commission provide service for 4 institutions. The independent commissions took their place between the administrative commission and the court and provided the additional oversight over the administrative commissions. Thus, the system turned to be three-level. Independent commissions are mainly made up of representatives of the law-enforcement structures (chaired by the deputy heads of Police).

At different stages the Chamber of Advocates and Human Rights Defender showed controversial attitude: they either participated or boycotted the commissions. At the moment the representatives of the Chamber of Advocates were replaced by the representatives of the Public Council. The representatives of the Office of Human Rights Defender have stopped the boycott and are back to the commissions.

Independent commissions: subjective approaches are applied

If we try to understand what we got with the introduction of the independent commissions, it is becoming obvious that the authors of the commissions’ format were so much focused on the fight against corruption that forgot what issues should be solved by the system of early conditional release.

The system of early release should evaluate the correction of the prisoner according to the Soviet terminology and the risk of re-offending according to the Western terminology. As far as the “correction of a person” is very obscure notion which is complicated to measure, we will apply the risk assessment.

The assessment could be done based on the behavior of the prisoner and the work that was conducted with him in the penitentiary institution firstly and based on the evaluation of the surroundings where the prisoner is supposed to return (habitation, family, profession, job opportunities etc) secondly.

While the administrative commission theoretically can express the opinion regarding the first part, the independent commission does not have sufficient information, appropriate experts and adequate criteria to answer both questions and substantiate its decisions. As a result, the decisions are made on the basis of subjective factors.

Immediately after the introduction of the independent commissions, the number of early released prisoners has dramatically decreased. Due to the absence of the criteria, today the prisoner cannot understand “the rules of the game” and does not know what should be done in order to be granted the approval of the independent commission. Taking into account the fact that the decisions are not substantiated and can not be appealed, the “reforms” consequently led to the strong discontent of the prisoners and raised protest actions.

Summarizing the aforementioned, the following main issues in the system of the early conditional release are listed below:

1. Neither the administrative nor the independent commissions have the criteria for assessment of re-offending risks.
2. Composition of the independent commissions:

a/ there is no professional capacity for risk assessment


b/ The representatives of law-enforcement structures have a corporate interest and are interested to release “potential criminals” as small as possible in number.

3. Decisions of the independent commissions are not substantiated: as a result, the prisoner does not understand the reasons of refusal and his/her further actions in order to get a positive conclusion.
4. Decisions of the independent commission cannot be appealed.
5. Although the decisions of the administrative commission may be appealed in the court, no prisoner would apply to the court to appeal against the institutions where he/she is kept.

Apparently the issue exists and it requires a solution.

To be continued