Russia plans 7 new “super-prisons” despite recruiting inmates for the war

Russia plans to build seven large prison complexes by 2035, which will also serve as detention centers, under a government decree amending the federal program for the development of the penal system.

The facilities, which Russian journalists have dubbed “super-prisons,” will together hold more than 20,000 people — 5,380 in pre-trial detention and 15,120 convicted prisoners.

They will also include courtrooms and offices for prosecutors, defense lawyers and public monitoring commissions. The government plans to use surveillance and security technology throughout.

The complexes are planned for the Kaluga, Astrakhan and Tyumen regions, Buryatia and Zabaikalsky Krai, as well as for the part of Ukraine’s Kherson region currently under Russian military occupation.

The first facility is expected to open in Tatarstan by 2030. Preliminary estimates put the cost of a single complex between €134 million and €208 million, with the total cost of the program expected to exceed €2.4 billion.

Russia’s Justice Ministry says consolidating detention and punishment functions in single facilities will cut the cost of keeping prisoners by 25–30% and allow the investment to pay for itself within 10 years, mainly by eliminating prisoner-transfer costs and reducing staffing requirements.

The planned construction comes after a sharp decline in the prison population. At the end of 2021, Russia held 465,000 people in detention, but by 2026 that figure had fallen to 282,000 – a drop of nearly 40%.

The head of the Federal Prison Service, Arkady Gostev, said in May that the recruitment of prisoners as contract soldiers for Russia’s war in Ukraine had contributed significantly to their reduction.

The recruitment of prisoners began in the summer of 2022 – immediately after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of the same year – first through the Kremlin-run Wagner paramilitary group and later directly through the Defense Ministry.