The GUFSIN held an exhibition of products made by prisoners in Yekaterinburg. As stated in the department, production is actively developing in the colonies, which are ready to replace companies leaving the Russian market. The Regional Newspaper writes that correctional institutions signed contracts for the manufacture of furniture for 3.5 million rubles over the two days of the exhibition.
“Colonies may well take the place of IKEA. If we compare furniture, we have better quality and lower prices. We are not businessmen,” said Ivan Sharkov, head of the department for labor adaptation of convicts of the GUFSIN of Russia in the Sverdlovsk region.
The government of the Sverdlovsk region and the GUFSIN are planning to create a woodworking workshop in the Middle Urals for the production of sheets for the manufacture of furniture. In Kamensk-Urals IK-47 at the end of April, as part of the import substitution program, the production of double-glazed windows was opened.
According to the head of the press service of the GUFSIN of Russia for the Sverdlovsk region, Alexander Levchenko, most of the furniture produced in the colonies is supplied to state customers.
“The authorities, the courts, the investigative committee, the bailiff service order a lot. Recently, IK-10 completed a large order for the Sverdlovsk Regional Prosecutor's Office. We supply furniture for schools, kindergartens, rest houses, sanatoriums. Good dynamics in municipal orders - last year they earned more than half a billion rubles, including 114 million - on orders for the Sverdlovsk region, ”says Levchenko.
Previously, prisoners have repeatedly told human rights activists about the problem of the use of forced and low-paid (essentially free) labor of prisoners in colonies throughout the country. In fact, Russia still has a system of hard labor, the conditions of which can be equated with torture. Prisoners work in the sewing industry, assemble furniture, make icons and weapons.
The Insider wrote about how they work in a clothing factory in a women's colony. One of the prisoners complained about working conditions in IK-2 in the Mordovian village of Yavas. She said that the administration had set a task: to sew 600 suits for Russian Railways workers in a week, that is, about 120 suits a day with the help of 160-170 prisoners.
In January, the founder of Gulagu.net, Vladimir Osechkin , published a conversation with a former prisoner of correctional colony No. 7 in the Omsk region, who told that convicts were forced to work in hazardous production in clandestine workshops, including making military weapons as gifts to high-ranking security officials from the FSB , TFR, FSIN and prosecutor's office. He himself painted military weapons, made congratulatory inscriptions on them.
“The maximum salary is 300 rubles per month. But that's only happened to me once or twice. The minimum is 30 rubles. They worked every day, on Saturday and Sunday too. They did not work only in those moments when some kind of commission came, ”said the former prisoner.
According to the former convict, in the industrial zone IK-7, the convicts built a yacht for the supervising prosecutor from an old tugboat.
