Breaking news! 6 foot 9 inch Brittney Griner being abused in prison! Forced labor from 7am to 3 am, routine beatings

This is unbelievable that they would throw a poor woman in jail over marijuana

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The Russian penal colony where Brittney Griner is now serving out her nine-year sentence is notorious for its brutal treatment of the female inmates, according to former prisoners and human rights activists.

Situated in the small town of Yavas, about 270 miles southeast of Moscow, penal colony IK-2 was founded for the Soviet gulag system in 1931.

Ivan Melnikov, the Russian representative of the European Committee of Human Rights, tells PEOPLE that he is surprised that of all the 36 women colonies in Russia, Griner was sent to Moldavia. "No [convicts] want to be sent there. It is not a good place."


No former inmates from IK-2 were willing to speak with PEOPLE for an interview. "They are frightened," Natalia Filimonova from the NGO Russia Behind Bars told PEOPLE.

In past interviews or statements, former inmates tell stories of routine brutality at the hands of staff, lack of medical care, malnutrition and slavery-like conditions.

"I haven't been able to sleep for years because of the trauma of having spent time there," said former prisoner Tatiana Gavrilova, in an interview with the independent Russian news website Sota.Vision. "When I first got there I was stripped naked and told to take off my cross." When she refused, saying she would die first, the camp director told her to get dressed and punched her in the back of the head.



"We were made to run up and down in a loop in the corridor… and duck under a baton at this [knee] height. If you touch it, you're beaten with it. The director is a maniac, he beats you up with batons, boxing gloves, anything. We had about one suicide a year."

She goes on to describe how, after she snapped back at one of the guards, the director came in and said, 'get down on your knees and beg forgiveness.' When she refused, he told her to stand with her hands against the wall — a punishment many of the inmates recall — and began beating her on the back with a metal rod until she collapsed to her knees.

In 2017, the Russian newspaper Moskovksii Komsomolyets published a special report on conditions in the IK-2 colony, saying that inmates are forced to work "from 7 a.m. to midnight and sometimes until three in the morning." They are not permitted to leave to go to the toilet, and so they "take jars and plastic bags with them, in which they relieve themselves without leaving their post."