Brittney Griner Transferred To Russian Penal Colony

Reuters reports:

U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner has been taken to a penal colony in the Russian region of Mordovia, a source familiar with the case told Reuters on Thursday.

In August, Griner was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony on drugs charges following her arrest at a Moscow airport in February with vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. She was moved from a detention centre near Moscow on Nov. 4 to be taken to an undisclosed prison location.

Inmates of Russian penal colonies are required to work long hours for meager pay on tedious manual tasks such as sewing. Former prisoners and human rights groups describe conditions there as harsh and unhygienic, with little access to medical care.

The BBC reports:



While men in penal colonies often work with wood processing or welding, female inmates are invariably employed at sewing clothes, mostly uniforms for the prison service, the army or the police. Equipment is old and workplaces poorly equipped, so Griner, who is 2.06m (6ft 9in) tall, will have to crouch at the sewing machine.

The Yavas penal colony – where Griner is thought to be imprisoned – does not have a good reputation, with inmates who worked there speaking of beatings and intimidation. “I worked as a seamstress and there is a law: if you do not fulfil the production rate, you are beaten,” former inmate Irina Noskova told Russia’s New Times in 2013.