Brittney Griner attends an appeal hearing
US basketball player Brittney Griner is appealing her nine-year sentence to prison....
Brittney Griner’s life in a Russian prison colony
After losing her appeal against a nine-year drug sentence last week, U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner will be sent to a Russian penal colony. There, she will have to do hard manual labour and won’t be able to get medical care.
Maria Alyokhina, a member of the feminist art group Pussy Riot who spent almost two years in jail for taking part in a punk protest against President Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral in 2012, knows this world well.
Alyokhina said in an interview that the first thing to know is that a prison colony is not like a normal prison.
“This is not a structure made of cells. This village looks strange, like a work camp in the Gulag “She was talking about the huge prison system set up by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to keep prisoners isolated and crush them.
“It actually is a labour camp because by law all the prisoners should work. The quite cynical thing about this work is that prisoners usually sew police uniforms and uniforms for the Russian army, almost without salary.”The colony was split into a factory area where prisoners made clothes and gloves and a “living zone” where 80 women lived in one room with only three toilets and no hot water, according to Alyokhina.
Griner, who has won two gold medals at the Olympics, could be sent to a colony soon if there isn’t another appeal or an agreement between Washington and Moscow to swap her for a Russian arms dealer who is in jail in the United States. This idea has been talked about for months but hasn’t happened yet.
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