Prison guards will soon have a new way to relax on the job, with plans in place to purchase massage chairs for a handful of pre-trial detention centers in a bid to combat work-induced stress, a news report said Friday.
At the cheaper end of the price range is a chair worth 49,000 rubles ($1,450) that will be bought for Moscow's Butyrskaya facility, Izvestia reported Friday, citing a representative of the Federal Prison Service.
The chair offers a range of relaxing options, including treatment for the buttocks, the report added.
Also on the list to receive massage chairs are facilities in the Nizhny Novgorod, Kamchatka and Yaroslavl regions and the republics of Mordovia, Yakutia and Komi.
In the far eastern Kamchatka region, guards will be able to relax in a chair worth 92,000 rubles ($2,720) that comes complete with an mp3 player.
The chairs are intended for psychological relaxation rooms, a representative for the Moscow branch of the Federal Prison Service was cited as saying.
"We are not working with angels," the unidentified representative said. "But we are getting the cheapest chairs, we do not have money for anything better."
A spokeswoman for the Professional Guild of Psychologists told Izvestia that the guards needed psychological counseling — rather than massages — which they could get outside of their workplace.
The Butyrskaya facility has previously mulled installing tanning bed for inmates, but dropped the idea due to the problems it would have caused to the detention regime, Moskovsky Komsomolets earlier reported.
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