(New York Post) Brittney Griner will endure merciless conditions inside a Russian penal colony — where rancid food, extreme isolation and tyrannical wardens await the WNBA star, former Russian prison inmates, their relatives and penitentiary experts told The Post.
Former US Marine Trevor Rowdy Reed, who spent nearly 1,000 days detained in Russia, was freed in April in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring to smuggle more than $100 million of cocaine into New York.
Reed was accused of assaulting two Moscow police officers in August 2019 and spent 11 months in a pretrial detention center in Moscow until a Russian court meted out a nine-year sentence in 2020. He was later shipped 350 miles away to a penal colony in the remote Russian republic of Mordovia, where he survived nine agonizing months until he was swapped this year.
“You gotta understand, the labor camps in Mordovia, these are pre-Stalin-era prisons, these were literally referred to as gulags,” Trevor’s father, Joey Reed, told The Post. “And even though there’s a federal authority for prisons, each warden has wide leeway to do whatever they want until it makes someone angry or leads to bad press.”
Officers of the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service gather by the entrance to the penal colony in the settlement of Novoye Grishino outside the town of Dmitrov in Moscow region.AFP via Getty Images
Freezing conditions, horrid food and heavily restricted access to the outside world typify Russian prisons — and possibly await Griner.POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Inmates sew at female prison number 22 in Russia’s Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.REUTERS
Griner was sentenced to serve nine years in a penal colony.Dmitrov TV
Reed, 62, said his son often described a dour, medieval atmosphere inside the penal colony where Trevor, now 31, lived in crude barracks built of brick and sheet metal. He routinely curled up near hot water pipes or piled on extra clothes during frigid nights in the desolate Mordovian plains, where January temps average in the low teens. When guards threatened to forcibly disrobe his son, Trevor threatened them back, his father said.
“They said they would take them off him and he said, ‘I will take you out trying,’” said Reed, of Granbury, Texas. “But the guards never beat or abused him because they knew he was on the trading block.”
The defiant Marine vet wasn’t beaten by jailers for those bold stands, but he did lose about 50 pounds from his unimposing frame due to the “horrible” food, his father said.
The sparse grub consisted primarily of potato soup or some kind of fish, which was typically filled with “crunchy bones” — so foul that even the barracks’ stray cats didn’t eat it, Reed said.
Griner could wind up in a harsh and remote penal colony like Trevor Reed, who was imprisoned in Russia for nearly two years.AFP via Getty Images
Conditions at the men’s high-security colony NS in Pokrov, Russia, are harsh — and similar to what pro basketball player Brittney Griner will likely face after being sentenced to nine years for drug smuggling.AFP via Getty Images
“That’s how bad it is,” he said. “There was no real health value to the food.”
Trevor Reed, who refused to work inside the penal colony, was tossed into solitary confinement for long stretches up to 28 days, his father said.
“They were trying to break my son,” Reed said. “The main reason he resisted was because he was angry.”
A female prison guard watches over a file of inmates in the yard of a prison camp in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.REUTERS
Inmates enter a sewing workshop inside female prison camp Number 22 in Russia’s Siberian city of Krasnoyars.REUTERS
The desperate veteran went on two hunger strikes to protest being barred from contacting his relatives 6,100 miles away and not receiving proper medical care, his father said.
“He would only drink water, but could only last about four or five days each time because he was already so malnourished,” Reed said. “He figured if he died of starvation, it would be an international incident.”
Now Trevor, who declined to be interviewed, has been back in the US for about eight months, recuperating from his nightmarish stint in Russia. Reed said his son is “doing well.”
Russian penal colonies are rife with human rights violations that are often “life-threatening,” according to a State Department report.AFP via Getty Images
Reed’s father, Joey Reed, campaigned for his son’s release in front of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, in 2021.AFP via Getty Images
Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, has lobbied tirelessly to make sure the basketball star is not forgotten.NBAE via Getty Images
He’s going to return to college,” Joey said. “He’s got a lot of options on the table.” And despite the ordeal, “Trevor speaks fluent Russian now,” his father added, which he first learned from a Russian woman he dated before being arrested — and perfected behind those prison walls.
Other inmates in Russian prisons or penal colonies, meanwhile, have not been as fortunate. Many, for instance, are subjected to systemic torture, which can sometimes culminate in death or suicide. The facilities are rife with human rights violations that are often “life-threatening,” according to a State Department report.
“Overcrowding, abuse by guards and inmates, limited access to health care, food shortages, and inadequate sanitation were common in prisons, penal colonies, and other detention facilities,” the 2021 assessment found.
Even more dire, some penal colony inmates are limited to just six phone calls per year, according to Daniel Balson, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia.
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