Associated Press
MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin will advise prison authorities across Russia to free all women inmates with children under 3 years old, an official said Friday.
Putin will tell regional pardons commissions to free the mothers regardless of their crimes, said Nadezhda Mikhailova, deputy head of the Kremlin’s pardons department. All cases would be considered individually, she said.
Young children of women prisoners are kept in special centers at the prisons. They sleep separately from their mothers, but the women are allowed to see them during the day. There are currently 493 such children in Russia’s prisons, Mikhailova said.
She did not say precisely how many women the proposed amnesty would free.
Pardoning the women was recommended by Anatoly Pristavkin, the former head of a presidential pardons commission. Putin dissolved the commission last year, turning the prerogative over to regional commissions, but Pristavkin still serves as a Kremlin adviser.
Mikhailova said no mothers could be pardoned until the new regional commissions are formed. So far, only the Saratov region has formed one, and Putin did not give the regions a deadline.
Corrections officials said last fall that 738,500 people — including 45,000 women — were serving prison sentences in Russia, and 200,000 others are in pretrial detention centers.
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