Depending upon the seriousness of a crime, its category, and the age and occupation of the individual, until the mid-1960s a convicted person was confined in a correction camp, a labor colony, a prison or, if subject to military law, a military disciplinary unit. Prisons included penitentiaries, prison factories, town jails, and detention facilities of the security troops.
A majority of labor colony inmates were political prisoners and, if there were a few of them that had not completed their sentences or were not released in amnesties by the mid-1960s, they were probably transferred to penitentiaries. Increased use of judicial commissions for petty crimes and an accompanying change minimizing confinement in lesser cases have further reduced prison populations and eliminated the need for separate categories of correction institutions. As a result, the 1970 law on the execution of court sentences treats all places of confinement as prisons or penitentiaries (under the authority of the Ministry of Internal Affairs) or as military disciplinary units (under the Ministry of the Armed Forces).
Place of detention vary, nonetheless. Maximum security prisons are provided for those convicted of crimes against the state's security, serious economic crimes, homicides or other violent crimes, and recidivists. All convicted persons are obliged to perform useful work, and an effort must be made to educate and rehabilitate the inmates. Consequently, all but town jails and those facilities designed to hold persons for short stays have labor and educational facilities.
A convict is paid according to the country's standard wage scales. He receives 10 percent of his wages; the remainder goes to the penitentiary administration as state income. The maximum working day is twelve hours. If work norms are regularly exceeded, sentences are shortened accordingly.
Inmates are segregated for various reasons. Women are separated from men; minors, from adults; and recidivists and those convicted of serious crimes, from those serving short terms. Drug addicts and alcoholics are isolated whenever possible. Persons held in preventive arrest, not yet convicted of a crime, are separated when possible from convicted persons. Unless their conduct is considered intolerably uncooperative, they are not denied the ordinary prison privileges.
Usual convict privileges include some visits, packages, and correspondence. Privileges allowed vary with the severity of the original sentence and may be increased, reduced, or done away with altogether, depending upon the inmate's attitude and behavior. Consistently good conduct may also earn parole. An inmate who performs an exceptional service may be pardoned altogether; many were freed for their work in combating the great floods during the spring of 1970.
Other disciplinary measures include reprimand, simple isolation, severe isolation, or transfer to an institution with a more severe regimen. All convict mail is censored, and correspondence whose content is considered unsuitable is withheld. Conversation during visits is limited to Romanian or to a language familiar to someone available to monitor what is said.
Amnesties are granted periodically. Some, such as those that freed political prisoners in 1964 and the one in late 1970, reduce prison populations considerably. They may, as in 1964, free a particular category of prisoner or, as in the December 30, 1970, amnesty, serve to reduce sentences of all types but on a basis of the amount of the term unserved. At that time full pardon was granted all who had less than a year of their sentences to serve, even if an individual had been sentenced but had not yet begun to serve the term. Full pardon was also granted to pregnant women, women with children under five years of age who had up to three years of their sentences remaining, and to all women over the age of sixty. The amnesty even applied to cases in court. Trials were to continue, but the amnesty would take effect if it were applicable to the sentence. If, however, an amnestied person committed another crime within three years, he would be confined for the unserved portion of his commuted sentence in addition to the new one.