This July, the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, a partner of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), published a video recorded by an officer in a prison colony near Yaroslavl in central Russia. It showed an inmate being tortured.

The man is tied up, spread-eagle, on a table. One by one, people wearing camouflage uniforms beat him on the legs and heels with rubber truncheons. The man howls and begs for mercy. From time to time, the men pour water on his head from a bucket.

That’s how officers in a Russian prison conducted what one of them described as “educational work” with a convict. After the video was published and viewed by several million people, 12 employees of the Federal Prison Service (abbreviated FSIN in Russian) were arrested on charges of abuse of authority with the use of violence.

Based on judgments last year by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), Russia was implicated in over half of cases involving torture, inhuman treatment or ineffective investigation of such crimes.

Now, Novaya Gazeta has analyzed data from two of the largest Russian databases of cases like these. Though not every judicial decision is publicly available, the data detail almost 4,500 sentences handed to officials. Many abusers receive suspended sentences and are able to return to their duties in just a few years. And the compensation victims receive is often dozens of times less than requested.

One group that is not complained about much are the various branches of Russian intelligence. The data show no sentences handed out to FSB officers at all.

Russia told the UN Committee Against Torture that the case in Yaroslavl was an exception. The convict had intentionally provoked the guards, senior FSIN officials said.

But a month later, Novaya Gazeta published a video that showed another beating in the same prison. This time, FSIN employees forced inmates to run along a corridor as they beat them with their bare hands and truncheons. Then the prisoners were taken to a separate room, without a camera, followed by a crowd of jailers. One holds a bedsheet. In the previous video, a sheet was used to muffle the victim’s screams.

Evidence shows the use of violence by Russian officials isn’t confined to just a few “provocateurs,” and it’s certainly not limited to one prison. In the last six months, Russian media outlets and human rights organizations reported over fifty torture cases. But these reports rarely lead to trials. Moreover, since the Russian penal code contains no specific article banning torture by officials, those cases that are brought to court are usually classified under part three of Article 286: “Improper exercise of authority with the use of violence or weapons or with infliction of injury.”

To gather a fuller picture of who is tried for this crime in Russia and how, reporters analyzed all the available sentences handed down on this charge from 2011 to 2017.

The analysis enabled reporters to reach some conclusions about the extent of violent official abuses of power in Russia, actions which, according to the UN, should be classified as torture.

The problem isn’t limited to the army, prisons, or police stations; it also occurs in other state institutions.

The Dataset

There are a few caveats: Any individual case can include from one to several people, so the number of cases doesn’t equal the number of convicted officials. Not just violence, but also other crimes ( such as causing a major accident, lengthy stoppage of transport or of a production process, or causing significant material damage) are also included. These cases were excluded from the analysis.

Finally, the vast majority of judicial verdicts in Russia are guilty — over 99 percent in 2017.