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During the Soviet era, Kazakhstan was a land of forced labor camps. The system of forced labor camps was established two years after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and continued throughout Joseph Stalin's reign due to large-scale industrial construction between 1950 and 1960, which demanded many workers. Offenders from throughout the Soviet Union were sent to camps in Kazakhstan to serve their sentences. At that time, the republic's prison service (the criminal-executive system) was a component of the Soviet Union's system and had all the same features. The criminal policy had a punitive character that resulted in severe crowding. Political and religious dissenters were sent to the same labor camps where professional offenders charged with murder and theft were serving their sentences. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan became independent and established its own penal system.
One of the main features of any criminal justice system is the number of offenders. Complete and reliable information on the number of offenders in Kazakhstan is available for the past 25 years, which includes the years when Kazakhstan's penal system was governed by the Soviet Union structure, as well as the years after it gained its independence and began to develop its own criminal justice system.
Figure 1 illustrates that the number of people held in criminal-executive institutions, which includes pretrial inmates, changed considerably throughout the years. From 1976 to 1982, the numbers rose steadily: The incarceration rate increased by 4 percent to 7 percent annually and reached a total of 86,572 inmates by 1982, when the numbers began to increase rapidly. By 1983, the number had increased by 9,600 people and by 1984, the incarceration rate surpassed 100,000. One reason for this growth was predominance of the accusatory tendency and punitive character of the Soviet Union's criminal policy and the republic, which changed in 1982.
From 1984 until 1987, the number of offenders decreased by 19,000. This sudden decrease was due mainly to the beginning of democratic changes throughout the Soviet Union and the liberalization of society and the criminal justice policy. In 1987, an amnesty law was adopted. As a result, 7,000 inmates were released from prison and the same number were given suspended sentences with obligatory work in which inmates were...