Things Are Not Looking Good For Brittney Griner’s Life In Russian Penal Colony

The conditions that are awaiting WNBA star, Brittney Griner, behind the walls of a Russian penal colony are not promising. In fact, things are looking rather bleak for the professional athlete as she’s headed for banal menial labor, less than stellar personal hygiene, and a lack of access to medical care for the remainder of her lengthy prison sentence. Griner was arrested on drug charges in Russia and sentenced to nine years behind bars.

You can almost guarantee that Griner has not had much experience with manual labor. It’s going to be a whole lot more difficult than playing professional basketball, that much is for sure. You can bet she really does regret slamming the U.S. justice system, having now tasted what other countries consider to be just.

According to OANN, “It’s a world familiar to Maria Alyokhina, a member of feminist art ensemble Pu**y Riot who spent nearly two years as an inmate for her part in a 2012 punk protest in a Moscow cathedral against President Vladimir Putin.”

During an interview, Alyokhina stated that the first thing folks need to understand is that a penal colony is very different from a regular prison.

“This is not a building with cells. This looks like a strange village, like a Gulag labour camp,” she explained, making a reference to the extensive penal network which was established by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to isolate and brutalize inmates.

“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,” Alyokhina continued.

Here’s a bit more about colony conditions via the interview with Alyokhina:

The colony was divided between a factory area where the prisoners made garments and gloves and a “living zone” where Alyokhina said 80 women lived in one room with just three toilets and no hot water.

Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, could soon be transferred to a colony in the absence of a further appeal or an agreement between Washington and Moscow to swap her for a Russian arms dealer jailed in the United States – a possibility that was floated months ago but has yet to materialise.

In a Pussy Riot show that has toured the world and is now playing in Britain, Alyokhina relives the memories of her time as an inmate – snowy prison yards, plank-like beds, long spells in solitary confinement and punishment for minor infringements such as an unbuttoned coat or poorly attached nametag.

The artist revealed that she was constantly being video recorded by prison guards due to the fact she was a “famous provocateur.”

Another individual who was a recent detainee in a penal colony, Yelena, went on to describe a very similar experience to Alyokhina’s from a decade ago.

Yelena, 34, ended up serving an eight-year sentence in a colony located in Siberia after she too was convicted of possessing drugs. The woman revealed that she was only paid 1,000 rubles a month for working brutal 10-12 hour shifts in a sewing workshop. This comes out to about $16. Sounds a whole lot like slave labor, doesn’t it? Very harsh sentence for a non-violent crime. Seems as if the Russians just want extremely cheap labor and use these offenders to fulfill that need.

“Girls with a strong, athletic build are often given much heavier jobs. For example, they load sacks of flour for a prison bakery or unload mountains of coal,” she stated.

“Prisoners could face punishment for inexplicable ‘offenses’ such as placing a wristwatch on a bedside table. The ultimate sanction was solitary confinement, known as ‘the Vatican,'” OANN reported.

“Just as the Vatican is a state within a state, solitary confinement is a prison within a prison,” Yelena explained. She then commented on some of the medical care the inmates received, noting that a gynecologist would stop by the colony once a month, where 800 women or more were being held.

“You do the math, what are the chances of being the one to get through to a doctor? Practically zero,” she added.

And then, of course, there’s the language barrier that’s going to make things much, much more difficult. As if they weren’t already bad enough, right?

“The brother of Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine serving 16 years in a Russian penal colony on espionage charges that he denies, said he is granted a 15-minute phone call each day to his parents, cannot call other family members or friends, and has no access to email or the internet,” the report said.

Whelan then said that his brother has to work at least eight hours a day for six days a week doing menial tasks such as making buttonholes, which has led to a repetitive strain injury.

Prisoners are forced to sleep in barracks and access to necessities, such as medication, is heavily dependent on paying off guards with bribes. These same guards are the ones that determine the conditions of the colony, along with the elder inmates and the warden.

This sounds pretty horrific, doesn’t it?

Makes you glad to live in a country like ours with a mostly fair judicial system.