The Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners were adopted on 30 August 1955 by the United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, held at Geneva, and approved by the Economic and Social Council in resolutions of 31 July 1957 and 13 May 1977. The treatment of prisoners is also addressed in the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Although not legally binding, the Minimum Standards provide guidelines for international and domestic law for citizens held in prisons and other forms of custody. The basic principle described in the standards is that "There shall be no discrimination on grounds of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status".
Part I contains Rules of General Application. It contains standards which set out what is generally accepted as being good principle and practice in the treatment of prisoners and the management of penal institutions. Specifically, it covers issues related to minimum standards of accommodation (rules 9 to 14), personal hygiene (15 and 16), clothing and bedding (17 to 19), food (20), exercise (21), medical services (22 to 26), discipline and punishment (27 to 30), the use of instruments of restraint (33 and 34), complaints (35 and 36), contact with the outside world (37 to 39), the availability of books (40), religion (41 and 42), retention of prisoners' property (43), notification of death, illness, transfer (44), removal of prisoners (45), the quality and training of prison personnel (46 to 54), prison inspections (55).
Part II contains rules applicable to different categories of prisoners including those under sentence. It contains a number of guiding principles (rules 56 to 64). Rule 61 is key to the guiding principles and states: "The treatment of prisoners should emphasize not their exclusion from the community, but their continuing part in it." Part II also covers the treatment (rehabilitation) of prisoners (65 and 66), classification and individualisation (67 to 69), privileges (70), work (71 to 76), education and recreation (77 and 78), social relations and after-care (79 to 81).
Part II also contains rules for prisoners under arrest or awaiting trial (generally referred to as remand), rules for civil prisoners (for countries where local law permits imprisonment for debt, or by order of a court for any other non-criminal process) and rules for persons arrested or detained without charge.
There is also a set of standards referred to as the "Handbook on prisoners with special needs" published in 2009 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
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“An indirect quotation we can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict standard of more and less; what is involved is evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an essentially dramatic act.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“Trust men, and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules of trade.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Narcissist: psychoanalytic term for the person who loves himself more than his analyst; considered to be the manifestation of a dire mental disease whose successful treatment depends on the patient learning to love the analyst more and himself less.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“When posterity judges our actions here it will perhaps see us not as unwilling prisoners but as men who for whatever reason preferred to remain non-contributing individuals on the edge of society.”
—George Lucas (b. 1944)