What awaits the basketball player Brittney Griner in the Russian colony where she is kept

American basketball player Britney Griner she was sent to a Russian penal colony to serve nine years in prison for illegal drug possession.

No one knows how long she will actually serve as the US wants to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the Russian government in order to free her.

Until it happens Your life in a Russian prison will definitely not be easy. and will probably accept the terms just like any other prisoner.

In early November, Griner lost her appeal against charges of drug possession and was later transferred from a Moscow pre-trial detention center to a strict regime colony.

But only now it became known about his whereabouts. According to her lawyers, she is in the women’s correctional colony IK-2, in remote village of Yavas in Mordovia500 km southeast of Moscow.

Types of Russian prisons

The concept of “penal colony” revives memories of Gulag of Soviet timesbut in this case it simply refers to a prison with several rows of low buildings containing common barracks for prisoners and separate buildings containing workshops.

For several days, no one, including his lawyers, knew where Griner had been sent. For Russia, this is normal, and when the families of prisoners cannot afford a good lawyer, letters from prison sometimes take weeks to arrive.

The prison where Griner is being held is one of Russia’s regular penal colonies, where most of the country’s 453,000 prisoners are held.

Repeat offenders or those convicted of serious crimes are sent to strict regime or special regime colonies.

The difference lies in the number of family visits allowed, the frequency of food or clothing transfers allowed, and the severity of penalties for breaking the rules.

Some criminal offenses are punishable by time in cells without access to the open air.

At the other end of the prison scale are “settlement colonies” for persons who have committed minor offenses, more relaxed and even with days off.

Life in a pre-trial detention center

Griner’s conviction does not surprise anyone in Russia: 13.5% of all sentences in 2021 were passed possession, smuggling or dealing in illegal drugs. For women, this figure rises to 42%, although not all are punished with imprisonment.

Russian police have been accused for years of inflating crime statistics by planting drugs or forcing detainees to confess. Griner’s case was different: he admitted to having cannabis oil cartridges in his luggage when he returned to Russia in February to play off-season basketball in the US.

For male prisoners, violence is a constant threat, whether it be from other prisoners or staff.

Videos of torture, rape and humiliation published last year they provided compelling evidence of an organized system of intimidation, extortion and confession from prisoners, instigated by the prison authorities.

This kind of violence has no place in women’s prisons, but Olga Podoplelova of Russia Behind Bars, a non-profit organization, says prisoner life is not easy.

“There is no informal prison hierarchy in women’s prisons, but the administration controls everything and there is many ways to make a hermit’s life hell”, assures Podoplelova.

Duties of prisoners

Under Russian law, prisoners must work. Most do, as refusal usually means trouble, although the highest breed of convicts in the male criminal hierarchy known as thieves (literally translated into Spanish as “thieves”), denied in principle.

The prison regime offers meager pay for conditions that many observers call slave labor.

“Prisoners work 12-16 hours a day, with breaks for lunch and toilets,” says Podoplelova.

While men in penal colonies often work in woodworking or welding, women are employed in tailoring, mostly uniforms for the prison service, the army or the police.

The machines are old and the work stations are poorly equipped, so Griner, who is 2.06 meters tall, will have to duck in front of the sewing machine.

The Yavas penal colony, where Griner is said to be, has a poor reputation, and the female inmates who worked there speak of beatings and intimidation.

“I worked as a seamstress, and there is a law: if you don’t meet the norm, they beat you,” former prisoner Irina Noskova told the Russian publication. new times in 2013.

limited rights

Attempts to fight for the rights of prisoner workers are rare.

Two women who condemned the issue with a hunger strike, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were jailed two years after their group Pussy Riot held a punk concert in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.

Alyokhina has served her sentence in two regular prisons and says the traditions dating back to Joseph Stalin’s Gulag system are very much alive.

“All this (work) without proper food, without a proper medical system and without any protection of human rights,” he recently told Reuters.

Tolokonnikova served part of her term in another women’s colony.

Russia’s most notorious prisoner is opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who has also launched a campaign to improve prison conditions and raise wages.

Navalny is serving a nine-year sentence in a strict regime colony 250 kilometers east of Moscow. His lawyer called the place “monstrous”.

He, too, had to make clothes, but managed to convince the authorities to replace the old four-legged short stools with suitable swivel chairs for him and a few employees.

The authorities also made it difficult for him to communicate with defense lawyers. The glass screen that separated them was replaced with an opaque film, and he was forbidden to show them documents. “I was placed in a 1 x 1 meter room facing a plastic wall with a human shape behind it,” he complained.

Britney Griner is unlikely to withstand such pressure.

But it is unlikely that his foreign passport and sporting fame will make it easier for him to live in ordinary prisoners.

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