WNBA star Britney Greiner He was sentenced to nine years in prison to serve in a Russian penal colony. And while the sentence may sound tricky, the reality is much worse.
A penal colony is a facility where inmates are housed. But they go beyond the ordinary prison or prison. In the past, prison colonies They are built on small, largely uninhabited islands. Once efforts were made to promote humane judgments with an emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment, many states that had previously used punishment colonies as places of punishment began abandoning facilities.
Alcatraz, Robben Island in South Africa and green island In Taiwan are some examples of former penal colonies that are now Gothic tourist attractions.
Now Griner will have to spend nine years in seclusion in one of these terrible places.
What is a Russian penal colony?
according to Associated Press, There was nearly 520,000 prisoners In the Russian prison system as of last year. Many prisons are collective colonies modeled after Soviet concentration camps, where inmates live in dormitories and work in factories.
Valerie Borshova former member of Russian parliament Who served on a committee focused on prison reform, told the New York Times in 2021 that prisoners sometimes share a room with 40 to 80 other men, which makes it very difficult to be there.
The Times reported that sewing uniforms had replaced the hard work of mining and harvesting timber in Joseph Stalin’s camps.
According to Olga Romanova, the leader of one of the organizations for the rights of prisoners, Russian Vladimir Putin “wanted to have in his hands a frightening tool.” You need a site where everyone is afraid to go. 684 of the 692 prisons in Russia were penal colonies in 2021.
Russia’s prison system
the majority Russian prisons and penal colonies were built during the Stalinist era. Despite many attempts to reform the Russian prison system, it still looks like Soviet gulag: Torture and human rights abuses are widespread, and the prison service is a well-equipped machine that knows how to hide diseases and achieve more.
One of the most disturbing statistics is the high recidivism rate in the Russian prison system. It has increased in recent years and has become a sign of the inefficiency of the prison system in general.
However, despite its inefficiency, the prison system in Russia serves as a key component of the mechanism that maintains the country’s political system and controls society. There are reportedly no plans to reform the prison system President Putinwho mentioned this during his annual press conference on December 20, 2018.
In response to a question about capabilities FSIN Reform In light of reports that prisoners have been tortured, he said that while improving the efficiency of the prison system would be necessary, no more substantive changes were required.
The lack of independent institutions monitoring what happens in prisons exacerbates the repressive nature of the system as a whole and creates new opportunities for its use as a tool of political repression.
As a result, the FSIN It operates as a distinct state “within a state”, lacking oversight mechanisms while having its own health care system, transportation system, education system, and a unique system of commodity trade characterized by endemic corruption and the primacy of informal rules and hierarchy over formality, as in Russian power structures .
There is no indication that the practice of using prison as a useful tool to keep disobedient citizens, as well as political and commercial rivals, will be curbed in the coming years. Nor is there any indication that prisoners’ behavior will be reported.
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