Opinion from Phil Boas: The Phoenix Mercury star now languishes in one of Russia's worst prisons. Here are the conditions Brittney Griner likely faces in IK-2.
Brittney Griner, a U.S. basketball star, is serving her sentence at the IK-2 penal colony in Mordovia, about 350 miles southeast of Moscow.The story of Brittney Griner may ultimately turn out to be an historic marker that shows just how completely ignorant Americans were of their world in the early 21st century.
The Brittney Griner story is really an old story, a soul crushing tale of how historic events are indifferent to the agony of a single human being.We all know Griner’s predicament could end tomorrow with a U.S.-Russian prisoner swap. But what few are saying and must know is that it might never end, that Brittney Griner is caught in the awakening gears of a changing world and could conceivably spend the rest of her life in captivity.
“Our prison system was never reformed,” said “Nadya” Tolokonnikova, a member of the Russian punk band and activist group Pussy Riot and one of Griner’s fiercest advocates. . Despite several attempts to reform the prison system in Russia, they still resemble the Soviet Gulag: human rights violations and torture are common.”serving her nine-year sentence in IK-2
“When the girls find out that they’re going to Mordovia, they cut their wrists, do everything possible: get sick, swallow nails,In a September 2013 letter, Pussy Riot’s “Nadya” described how Russian internment is not just a prison of walls and barbed wire. The sewing machines are “ancient” and dangerous, she wrote. “Your hands are pierced with needle marks and covered in scratches, your blood is all over the work table, but still, you keep sewing.”“The saw cuts the fabric along a chalk line continuously. God forbid, if the saw cuts somewhere else [and not on the chalk line], then all 100 cuts are ruined. I can say that, cut, blood flows. This is definitely unsafe, requiring some training.
In their book “Before and After Prison: Women's Stories,” a group of Russian sociologists explained that the heavy surveillance in Russian women’s prisons is enhanced by a less formal system of snitching.with the management for snooping on others, which was originally created in the Gulag [Soviet-era labor camps], has effectively survived until the present day,” St. Petersburg sociologist Yelena Omelchenko told The Moscow Times.
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