A Russian penal colony is a punishing incarceration system, according to experts & formers prisoners. It would've been no different for Brittney Griner long term. Women who've lived through the experience paint a grim, devastating picture of life there.
A major theme of Alyokhina’s book is humiliation. She writes repeatedly about the ways Russian guards tried to break her mentally, and explains how in both prison — like Griner, she was initially held in a Moscow detention facility — and the penal colony, strip searches were common, often done in view of other prisoners. The detention center building itself was so old and decrepit, prisoners plugged gaps in the windows with sanitary napkins and breadcrumbs.
Like Griner, Alyokhina was considered a political prisoner, which she says protected her to a degree. Because she was in regular contact with human rights groups, Russian authorities hesitated to mistreat her directly.But it was a different story for Alyokhina’s cellmates. She’s blunt about the mental toll penal colonies take on prisoners:"Here there is no safety net, no kindred spirit, and so if you give yourself over to anxiety, it is so huge, limitless and thrilling, so rapid and endless."Daily life in the colonies is bleak, to say the least: In the Urals, where Alyokhina served time, she writes that there was so much snow"my legs disappear in the White Sea.
Griner has talked openly about the benefits of therapy and told the court she had hash oil because of a medical cannabis prescription.In October, Griner’s wife told Gayle King of CBS that Brittney was"at her absolute weakest moment in life." No matter the crime committed that landed someone in a penal colony, Alyokhina says, the system, and those who uphold it, are merciless.
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