MOSCOW (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin called on lawmakers Tuesday to ease punishments for minor crimes, and an aide said the old sentencing guidelines were a relic of a ``totalitarian state of the last century.''
``I'm sending over to parliament a package of legal amendments intended to liberalize the criminal legislation...to soften the punishment for minor criminal offenses,'' Putin told his Cabinet in comments broadcast on Russian television.
Russian courts routinely order incarceration for even the most minor crimes, a trend that has flooded Russian prisons. According to the latest official data, Russia has 905,000 inmates, one of the largest per-capita prison populations in the world. Cells are often overcrowded, and tuberculosis and other diseases are rampant.
Dmitri Kozak, deputy head of the presidential administration, said Putin's package ``lowers and in many cases excludes criminal punishment for minor crimes, first of all those of an economic character,'' the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
He said current sentencing guidelines reflect the thinking of the ``totalitarian state of the last century'' and said courts should in many cases order fines instead of prison sentences. He said the courts should go easier on juvenile delinquents, particularly first-time offenders.
``As is well known, imprisonment doesn't reform, but often hardens adolescents,'' he said.
Valery Abramkin, a former Soviet political prisoner and member of Putin's human rights commission, said the president proposed changing sentences for drug and weapons possession charges ``to reduce the stream of people going into prison and reduce the amount of time they spend there.''
The current prison population represents a huge financial burden, he said.
``We can't keep such an enormous number of inmates. The budget can't sustain it,'' Abramkin said.
The amendments introduced by Putin Tuesday are part of a broader effort to reform Russia's post-Soviet legal system - a process that has been delayed by more than a decade of political infighting and foot-dragging by prosecutors and others who stand to lose much of their power under the proposed changes.
Last summer, Russia's parliament passed a new Criminal Procedural Code, with strong backing from Putin, that promised the introduction of jury trials by Jan. 1 of this year, removed some powers from prosecutors, and strengthened the independence of judges. However, lawmakers later agreed to delay the deadline for introducing jury trials by four years.
Putin has praised the criminal code, saying it has already led to a 20 percent reduction of the number of people in detention and a threefold increase in not guilty verdicts.