Griner Is Being Sent to a Russian Penal Colony. What Is That?

Some prisoners are mistreated. They have to work 16 hours a day. Some people are forced to watch propaganda from Russia.

This is the world of the Russian penal colony, and it's about to be filled with the newest member of the team.

The descendants of the notorious Stalin-era labor camps are called Penal Colonies. Rights groups say the treatment of prisoners has improved. According to her lawyers, it could take up to a few months before she is moved from the center where she has been held.

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The penal colonies are characterized by brutality, overcrowding and harsh conditions and are often governed by a rigid prison culture.

In an interview from a prison last year, Russia's most famous prisoner, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, described a schedule of calisthenics, sweeping the yard and games of chess or backgammon, as well as five daily sessions of screen time where inmates are forced to watch

He said to imagine a Chinese labor camp where everyone marches in a line and video cameras are everywhere. There's a culture of snitching.

In June, Navalny was transferred to a maximum-security prison, where he works at a sewing machine for seven hours a day.

A member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot said in 2012 that people who got sick could die because there was no hot water, warm clothes or medicine in the prison where they were imprisoned.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's indictment of the Soviet Penal system should be read by Russian students according to President Putin.

She has been reading books by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian writer whose work was marked by his harrowing experiences in the country's penal system, after he was sentenced to four years' hard labor in Siberia, according to reports. According to Dostoyevsky, the degree of civilization can be judged by entering its prisons.

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