NPR
MOSCOW — This week, lawyers for jailed American basketball star Brittney Griner revealed she is currently on her way to a Russian penal colony to begin serving out her nine-year sentence on drug smuggling charges. Which prison, exactly, is unknown. Neither is Griner’s current location. Prisoner transfers often take several weeks, and only then are Russian authorities required to reveal a convict’s whereabouts, Griner’s legal team says.
Nearly half a million Russians are currently incarcerated— the highest number on the European continent, according to 2022 figures. Yet those who have spent time in the system say Griner can expect an experience that is more aligned with the Soviet Union’s past than most Americans’ current ideas of criminal justice. “If jail is possible to imagine, then a penal colony, you can only imagine reading dissidents’ books,” says Maria Alyokhina, who spent nearly two years in a colony following a protest performance in a Moscow church as a member of the renowned feminist punk collective Pussy Riot.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/10/1135756352/brittney-griner-russian-penal-colony-pussy-riot
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