US women’s basketball star Brittney Griner is being transferred to a Russian penal colony, where conditions are often harsh and have raised concerns from international watchdogs.
Russia’s notorious penal colonies are nothing like conventional incarceration in the West. Here’s what you need to know.
Griner’s attorneys said they did not immediately know where her final destination will be. This is not unusual: the process of transferring a person to a penal colony is conducted in secret in Russia, with relatives and lawyers often unaware of where a detainee is being sent for several days, according to Amnesty International.
Last month, Griner lost her appeal against her nine-year drug sentence. He was arrested in February and convicted in August of intentionally smuggling drugs into Russia.
He has repeatedly apologized for bringing a small amount of cannabis into the country, where he played basketball in the off-season.
“Our primary concern continues to be BG’s health and well-being,” said her agent Lindsay Colas. “As we work through this very difficult phase of not knowing exactly where BG is or how she is doing, we are asking for the public’s support in continuing to write letters and express their love and care for her.”
Griner’s detention has raised concerns that she is being used as a political pawn in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The vast majority of Russia’s prisons are actually penal colonies, where inmates are housed in barracks instead of cells and often work, according to a report by the Poland-based Center for Oriental Studies (OSW).
More than 800 such facilities existed across Russia as of 2019, the agency said.
Most were built during the Soviet Union and have been compared by think tanks and human rights organizations to Soviet-era gulags – harsh prison camps that expanded across the region during Joseph Stalin’s rule in the mid-20th century.
Russia houses nearly half a million prisoners across its prison facilities, one of the highest in Europe, according to World Prison Brief – although the numbers have fallen in recent years, unlike in most parts of the world.
The level of supervision and restrictions placed on prisoners today depends on the type of facility they are sentenced to and not all require work.
However, a number of high-profile dissidents, activists and foreign nationals who have been sent to austere colonies have described painful and difficult experiences.
Detainees are often taken huge distances across the country and journeys to colonies are dangerous and can take up to a month, according to an Amnesty International report.
The guard said these trips are often made in narrow train cars. And inmates often arrive at facilities that contain poor and aging infrastructure and suffer from overcrowding, OSW found.
“Despite many attempts to reform the prison system in Russia, it still resembles the Soviet gulags: human rights violations and torture are common,” OSW said.
One former inmate, Konstantin Kotov, served what he said were two grueling sentences – the first for four months, the second for six months – at Penal Colony No. 2 outside Moscow for violating Russian anti-protest laws.
He was last released from prison in December 2020 and last year told CNN about the inmate experience.
“From the first minutes you’re here, you’re under mental and moral pressure,” he told CNN.
“You’re forced to do things you would never do in normal life. It is forbidden to talk with other convicts. They force you to learn the list of employee names. You are on your feet all day, from 6 am to 10 pm You are not allowed to sit down. They don’t allow you to read, they don’t allow you to write a letter. It can last two weeks, it can last three weeks.”
Kotov explained that the prisoners sleep in barracks rooms on iron bunks. About 50 to 60 men slept in his room, he said, each with only a small living space.
“You get up at 6 in the morning, go out into the yard nearby and listen to the national anthem of Russia – every day the anthem of the Russian Federation,” he said.
“You can’t write, you can’t read. For example, I watched TV almost all day, Russian federal channels. This is torture on television.”
Griner is not the first high-profile figure to be sent to a penal colony. Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was able to offer his first impressions after arriving at a facility last year, with a post on his official Instagram account.
“I had no idea that it was possible to organize a real concentration camp 100 kilometers from Moscow,” Navalny said, adding that his head had been shaved.
“Video cameras are everywhere, everyone is watched and the slightest violation is reported. I think someone upstairs read Orwell’s ‘1984,’” Navalny continued, referring to the classic dystopian novel.
Members of the activist art group Pussy Riot have also been sentenced to penal colonies. “This is not a cell building. This looks like a strange village, like a Gulag labor camp,” member Maria Alyokhina told Reuters last week.
“It’s actually a labor camp because by law all prisoners have to work. What’s quite cynical about this project is that the prisoners usually sew police uniforms and uniforms for the Russian army, for almost no pay.”
The colony was divided into a factory area where prisoners made clothes and gloves and a “living zone” where Alyokhina said 80 women lived in one room with just three toilets and no hot water.
Another member, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, went on hunger strike in 2013 to protest a return to Penal Colony No. 14 in the Mordovia region.
