Dmytro Yagunov: Informal prison hierarchies in the 21 century: subculture, trends and social control (The 2025 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology)

In this study, we raise the issues of the origins of Soviet criminal and prison subculture, the corresponding informal prisoner hierarchies, and the current state of this social and cultural phenomenon in post-Soviet states.

Accordingly, we raise questions about the historical origins and preconditions for the formation of the phenomenon, which continues to influence the lives of most citizens of countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and is also actively imported to these countries by the Russian Federation as part of its imperialist post-colonial public policy aimed at restoring the ‘Soviet space’.

Therefore, outlining the main thesis about the influence of the Soviet criminal and prison subculture today, we form a hypothesis that, despite its name, its origins can be traced back long before the creation of the Soviet Union and even long before the creation of the Russian model of political and state structures collapsed in 1917.