OREANDA-NEWS. Russia maintains its leading position in Europe in terms of the prison population, according to a report by experts from the University of Lausanne, published on Tuesday, prepared for the Council of Europe.

The total number of Russian prisoners in 2018 amounted to 602 176 people - more than anywhere else in Europe - and roughly corresponds to the population of a country like Montenegro. Followed by the United Kingdom (84 373), Poland (73 822) and France (69 596 prisoners). At the same time, Russia was among the countries where in the last 10 years the most significant decrease in the number of prisoners was observed - by 32.4%.

Europeans are most often jailed for drug, theft, murder and robbery crimes. The most common term of imprisonment is 1–3 years; the average duration of imprisonment does not exceed 8.2 months. Life sentence is serving 1.2% of convicts. In Russia, the majority of prisoners serve sentences ranging from 5 to 10 years, less than 1% live for life, and the most common are crimes related to drug trafficking, murder, assault and robbery.

The death rate among the prison population of Russia is 2 times higher than the average in Europe: 51 cases per 10,000 prisoners, while every tenth person committed suicide.

If we proceed from the declared cost of keeping a Russian prisoner (the figure is based on data from the Russian authorities, but not all discrepancies were explained in them, the report’s authors agree), it is easy to calculate that approximately 1/7 of the prison budget is spent on prisoners.

Get operational comments FPS failed. “In total, over 213,000 convicts were employed in paid work,” says the latest report on the results and main activities of the service, which is published on the website and dated 2015-2017 Compared with 2013, the average daily wage of working convicts increased by 11.6% from 195.5 to 218.6 rubles.