Harku Prison

Harku Prison is located on the outskirts of Tallinn (around 12 kilometres from the city centre) on 8.3 hectares of land on the eastern side of Harku village.

The prison is made up of six units: management; an imprisonment department; a social department; a medical department; a financial department; and an administrative department.

The prison has a staff of 87, of whom 66.5 are prison officers.

As of October 2008 the prison had 119 inmates, 117 of them convicted and 2 being held in custody.

Harku Prison differs from other Estonian prisons not only in terms of the sex of its inmates, but also in terms of the fact that children up to the age of 4 can stay here with their mothers – in a separate department especially designed for this purpose.

The prison also has a rehabilitation ward for a maximum of 8 prisoners with drug addiction problems. This ward is separated from other prisoners. It offers an intensive programme to help the patients cope with their addiction and overcome it.

Inmates at Harku Prison have the chance to obtain both basic and secondary education and to learn a trade as either a dressmaker or a boiler operator.

Since March 2001 the work of the dressmaking factory at Harku Prison has been coordinated by AS Eesti Vanglatööstus. In addition to their work in the factory, inmates are paid for any work they do in the boiler house, for cleaning work on prison premises and for work in the kitchen and laundry.

History of Harku Prison

In the 1920s and 1930s Harku was home to various custodial institutions:

• a correctional facility for underage offenders;
• Harku Prison for adult prisoners; and
• Harku Labour Camp for alcoholics and the work-shy.

Prisoners and convicts were put to work in the nearby peat bog and the fields of the local manor, whose animal husbandry and crop harvests brought extra food to the their tables. The work they did for the Harku peat industry was particularly profitable, since the state required a large amount of peat for heating purposes.

On 13 March 1941 Harku Prison was renamed Correctional Work Colony no. 1. In the years that followed the number of convicts rose to around 600 (including men).

Since 1965 the prison has only accommodated convicted female inmates. Its name was changed back to Harku Prison in 1993.