Brittney Griner was, just a few months ago, one of the great stars of women’s basketball in the United States. A double Olympic winner, sporting prowess and off-court public figure, her name was synonymous with success. until an “honest mistake” – as he described it during the trial – sentenced her to spend nine years in a Russian penal colony.
Center Phoenix Mercury, who played for the women’s professional basketball league in the United States (WNBA), arrived in Moscow (Russia) in mid-February this year to join UMMC Ekaterinburg, a club that pays more than one million dollars -almost five billion Colombian pesos- for playing during the low season of the WNBA.
However, what seemed like a regular search at the Russian airport to enter the country ended up becoming a media discovery: the authorities found two vaping cartridges with traces of cannabis oil that, six months later -in August-, earned Russian justice to sentence her to 9 years in prison for smuggling and possession of substances. She was sentenced and, until recently, transferred to IK-2, a prison that has little of a prison and much of a nightmare.
(Also read: Basketball star imprisoned in Russia will be sent to a penal colony).
Boykov, a lawyer for the WNBA star, criticized Griner’s sentence for being excessively harsh, just after the conviction’s appeal was rejected: “No hand-on-heart judge will honestly say that Griner’s nine-year sentence is in line with Russian criminal law.”.
Although the possession of Cannabis is punishable in Russia, it is not punishable to the point of being sentenced to spend years in jail, so Moscow has been accused of using Griner “as a political pawn”.
Much of the international attention has hung over the Griner case, even President Joe Biden paved the way for a prisoner exchange that, for the moment, has not seen the light of day. The smuggling charges were soon overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and months later by US backing for kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
Brittney Griner is expected to work 16-hour work days, and regularly deal with homophobia and racism in Russia’s prison environments.
(via TMZ) pic.twitter.com/ekJdi7eAGy
— Legion Hoops (@LegionHoops) November 28, 2022
From the big courts to a Russian penal colony
Penal colonies are heirs to Soviet-era forced labor camps, also known as gulags. They fall into four categories ranging from lenient to strict.
(Read on: Brittney Griner, Basketball Player Imprisoned in Russia, Takes Cheap Shot.)
A 2017 Amnesty International report characterized most of these prisons as “among the worst in Europe”. The Yavas penal colony, where Griner is being held, is no exception to the rule; quite the opposite, Fear, coercion, bribery and intimidation are elements that, according to the testimony of several women who have passed through there, are the mainstay of their stay in the penal colony..
You don’t have to be Black or LGBTQ to feel for or worry about Brittney Griner. You just have to be human! Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what she must be going through. pic.twitter.com/ekr9vkM7J3
— Maurice W (@iamMauriceW) November 29, 2022
“Griner is incarcerated in one of the 35 mid-level or “general regime” facilities dedicated to women prisoners. IK-2 has a dozen nondescript structures, built long and narrow, surrounded by walls and barbed wire”, notes ‘Los Angeles Times’.
Standard working days are 12 hours long, with breaks for lunch and bathroom breaks, in which the prisoners have to do sewing, specifically, the uniforms for Russian security forces.
(Of interest: Who is Brittney Griner, basketball star, sentenced to 9 years in prison).
“I worked as a seamstress and there is a law: if you don’t meet the production rate, they beat you,” Irina Noskova told the Russian media “The New Times” in 2013.
The treatment Brittney Griner could face in a Russian penal colony depends on a criminal justice system “based on fear, coercion, bribery,” said Marina Alexandrova, associate professor @UTAustin “My heart goes out to her.” pic.twitter.com/GOxPJtRx70
—Henry Molano Moreno (@HenryMolano1) December 4, 2022
Griner will have to face other challenges: being an American woman, black and openly gay in a country where the LGBTQ population is persecuted, and also, crossing the language barrier that was, until the moment of her arrest, totally foreign to her.
“It’s already a terrible place for a Russian,” Marina Alexandrova, a University of Texas professor who lectures on the history of Russian prisons, told the Los Angeles Times. And she added: “For someone with no connections, it’s worse.”
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