Forced Feeding of Persons Held in Russian Penitentiary Institutions: Origin and Development
Avdyukhin S.A. Forced feeding of persons held in Russian penitentiary institutions: origin and development. Penitentiary Science, 2025, vol. 19, no. 1 (69), рp. 65–73. doi 10.46741/2686-9764.2025.69.1.008
The article describes the history of forced feeding of persons held in penitentiary institutions in Russia, namely those serving imprisonment and arrested before trial for crimes committed. Purpose: to determine when and why hunger strikes of convicts and detainees appeared in our country; how the Russian state reacted to such hunger strikes before the 1917 revolution; whether forced feeding of persons held in penitentiary institutions was used during the Soviet period. Methods: the main provisions of the article are based on the study of pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern normative legal acts, works of legal scholars and historians, as well as memoirs of convicts. Results: hunger strikes of persons held in penitentiary institutions appeared as a social phenomenon in Russia in the first half of the XIX century. In pre-revolutionary Russia, there was no legislative regulation of the procedure for the actions of employees of penitentiary institutions in the event of a hunger strike by persons held in them. Cases of forced feeding in order to save the lives of starving people in the early XX century were juxtaposed with situations where the prison administration deliberately allowed prisoners to die of hunger. The practice of using forced feeding against people on a hunger strike in a penitentiary institution took place during the Soviet period. However, the legislative consolidation of the possibility of using forced nutrition and the establishment of the permissibility of such intervention in the event of an immediate threat to the life of a person on hunger strike occurred in the 1990s. Conclusion: the forced feeding of persons held in Russian penitentiary institutions has deep historical roots. Having been applied in the conditions of complete absence of regulation, forced feeding gradually gained its consolidation at the legislative level.
Keywords: Forced feeding; artificial nutrition; convict; imprisonment; history; hunger strike; refusal of food
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