It seems like things get worse for Brittney Griner almost every day.
WNBA star Brittney Griner received a harsh 9½-year prison sentence Thursday in her trial on drug charges in Moscow, close to the maximum term possible.
The basketball star’s attorneys plan to appeal, as the Biden administration urges Moscow to accept a deal to free Griner and former security consultant Paul Whelan, an American serving a 16-year sentence in Russia. Washington has declined to say whether the two could be released in exchange for imprisoned Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
If diplomatic efforts or the appeal fail, Griner could be sent to a penal colony, a Russian prison facility known for brutal conditions.
Here’s what to know.
What is a penal colony?
The penal system in Russia, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in a European country, oversees nearly 520,000 inmates, the Associated Press reported last year. Most of the prison facilities in Russia are known as penal colonies because inmates are required to perform labor during their sentence.
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If diplomatic efforts or the appeal fail, Griner could be sent to a penal colony, a Russian prison facility known for brutal conditions.
Here’s what to know.
What to know
- What is a penal colony?
- What is life in a penal colony like?
- Why was Brittney Griner in Russia?
- What drugs did Brittney Griner take to Russia?
- What are Russia’s drug laws?
What is a penal colony?
The penal system in Russia, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in a European country, oversees nearly 520,000 inmates, the Associated Press reported last year. Most of the prison facilities in Russia are known as penal colonies because inmates are required to perform labor during their sentence.
These institutions inherit many of their practices from the gulags, a network of forced-labor camps that stretched across the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin onward wielded the gulags as a tool of political repression and exploited prison labor to kick-start the country’s industrialization and later build major infrastructure projects. Among the best-known documentation of this period is “The Gulag Archipelago” by Nobel Prize-winning novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the camps.
Modern-day Russian penal colonies have become moneymaking enterprises, according to Olga Romanova, a Russian journalist and founder of a prisoners’ rights organization. She wrote in 2017 that every correctional facility has a production unit such as a sewing factory or a woodworking or metalworking shop, with most of the profits going to intermediary companies buying and selling on low-cost goods, or to the prison authorities “through kickbacks by companies that purchase the goods directly.”
What is life in a penal colony like?
Among the most prominent figures in recent years to toil inside a Russian penal colony is opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was jailed after recovering from a poisoning attack. An outspoken Kremlin critic, Navalny was sent to Penal Colony No. 2, east of Moscow, before he was reportedly transferred in June to a high-security facility, which his spokeswoman described as “a monstrous place.”
Through social media posts from his allies and family, Navalny painted a grim picture of life inside Penal Colony No. 2, calling it “our friendly concentration camp.” He accused guards of denying him proper medical care or the chance to sleep and described dehumanizing surveillance.
Media investigations have reported abuse of prisoners at such facilities. In 2017, Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta published a video that prompted outrage, showing guards beating an inmate with truncheons. The chairman of the U.N. Committee Against Torture said in 2018 that nearly 4,000 deaths were recorded at detention centers in Russia. Last year, the independent newspaper also released clips of uniformed guards striking inmates, including a man whose family said he later died of liver damage.
Members of Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in labor colonies in 2012 over a protest performance at a Moscow cathedral, before escaping the country more recently. One of them, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, went on hunger strike in 2013 to protest what she described as slave-like labor — including 16 to 17 hours of work a day — and threats to her life at Penal Colony No. 14, The Washington Post reported at the time.
Good she deserves it! She’s been a discussing citizen of the USA. Her excuse about not knowing is ridiculous!
Bet she wishes she had stood for our National anthem now.
I think she should spend every day in the prison that is the most rigorous one so she can remember every day if she gets back here and wants to complain about the freedom she has here
You are a piece of crap for not printing my previous comment
Gee Eddy!! That doesn’t sound very Christian of you. Yes Brittney was wrong but she doesn’t deserve that sentence for her crime show some compassion.
if you can’t do the time don’t do the crime. things might be different if she was a true American, but she does not like the USA, so let Her stay.
She hates America. She was aware of laws in Russia, having played there since 2014. She has no excuse. She knowing violated the laws of that land. There should not be a prisoner exchange. She needs to find out just what “Freedom” means, by not having any.