What is a penal colony?

The penal system in Russia, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in a European country, oversees nearly 520,000 inmates, the Associated Press reported last year. Most of the prison facilities are known as penal colonies because inmates are required to perform labor during their sentence. These institutions inherit many of their practices from the gulags, a network of forced-labor camps that stretched across the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin onward wielded the gulags as a tool of repression and exploited prison labor to kick-start the country’s industrialization and later build major infrastructure projects. Among the documentation of this period is “The Gulag Archipelago” by Nobel Prize-winning novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the camps. Modern-day Russian penal colonies have become moneymaking enterprises, according to Olga Romanova, a Russian journalist and founder of a prisoners’ rights organization. In 2017, she wrote that the correctional facilities had production units such as a sewing factory or a woodworking or metalworking shop, with most of the profits going to intermediary companies buying and selling low-cost goods, or to the prison authorities “through kickbacks by companies that purchase the goods directly.”

What is life in a penal colony like?

One of the most prominent figures to toil inside a Russian penal colony in recent years is opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was jailed after recovering from a poisoning attack . An outspoken Kremlin critic, Navalny was sent to Penal Colony No. 2, east of Moscow, before he was reportedly transferred in June to a high-security facility , which his spokeswoman described as “a monstrous place.” Through social media posts from his allies and family, Navalny painted a grim picture of life inside Penal Colony No. 2, calling it “ our friendly concentration camp .” He accused guards of denying him proper medical care or the chance to sleep and described dehumanizing surveillance. Media investigations have reported abuse of prisoners at such facilities. In 2017, Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta published a video that prompted outrage, showing guards beating an inmate with truncheons. The chairman of the U.N. Committee Against Torture said in 2018 that nearly 4,000 deaths were recorded at detention centers in Russia. Last year, the newspaper also released clips of uniformed guards striking inmates, including a man whose family said he later died of liver damage. Members of Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot were sentenced to labor colonies in 2012 over a protest performance at a Moscow cathedral, before escaping the country more recently. One of them, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, went on hunger strike in 2013 to protest 16 to 17 hours of labor a day and threats to her life at Penal Colony No. 14, The Washington Post reported at the time.

Why was Brittney Griner in Russia?

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, Griner played for the UMMC Ekaterinburg team based in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg during the WNBA offseason. During the trial in Moscow — which the United States has denounced as a sham — she called Yekaterinburg her “second home.” She said she was moved by the comradeship she found with her teammates there and by the enthusiasm of her fans, especially the young girls who would wait outside the team’s changing rooms to greet her. “That’s why I kept coming back,” she said.

What drugs did Brittney Griner take to Russia?

The Phoenix Mercury player has been detained since February over vape cartridges with less than a gram of cannabis oil and pleaded guilty in July to carrying the cartridges into Russia, where this is illegal. The prosecution contended that the 0.702 grams of cannabis found in her luggage after she landed at a Moscow airport was a “significant” amount. At her appeal hearing in October, Griner said through an interpreter that she never intended to break Russian law. “I want to apologize for this mistake,” she said via video link. But the court rejected her appeal, clearing the way for her transfer to a penal colony. Griner testified earlier in the trial that she uses cannabis oil in the United States for treatment of chronic pain from injuries but knew that carrying cannabis into Russia was illegal. She said she had rushed to pack for Moscow, unaware the cartridges were in her baggage, and that she flew to Russia despite U.S. State Department travel warnings because she did not want to let her Russian team down.

What are Russia’s drug laws?

While Griner’s sentence could be a harsh outlier in many countries, it is in line with Russia’s strict drug penalties. Griner was convicted of violating article 229¹(2)(c) of the Russian criminal code , which prohibits smuggling narcotics in a “significant amount,” defined quite aggressively, and carries with it “a minimum sentence of five to 10 years ‘deprivation of freedom’ along with the fine,” William E. Butler, an expert on Russian law at Penn State University, wrote in an article for the Conversation , a news and analysis site. Sentences at “the upper end of the spectrum seems to be common.” “To many in the U.S., nine years’ imprisonment may seem like a harsh penalty for cannabis possession,” Butler wrote. “But in Russia, it is par for the course for this crime.” Critics of Russia’s drug laws have accused the country of enforcing punitive measures that violate human rights. Russia has had a serious illicit drug problem since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with higher rates of drug addiction and drug-related mortality than its European neighbors.

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Russia is moving Brittney Griner to a penal colony. What you need to know.

By Amy Cheng

and

Updated November 19, 2022 at 8:51 a.m. EST|Published August 5, 2022 at 8:49 a.m. EDT

U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner before a Russian court reached a verdict in her drug case. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

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WNBA star Brittney Griner has been sent to a penal colony in Mordovia, more than 300 miles southwest of Moscow, her lawyers said this week, after a court rejected an appeal of her 9½-year prison sentence on drug charges.

“Brittney is doing as well as could be expected and trying to stay strong as she adapts to a new environment,” they said in a statement.

When news of her transfer first came to light earlier this month, the White House said that President Biden had directed his administration to “prevail on her Russian captors to improve her treatment and the conditions she may be forced to endure in a penal colony,” a type of Russian prison facility known for its brutal conditions.

Here’s what you need to know about the Russian prison facilities.

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