‘You’re Starved Just by the Food’: Grim Conditions Await Brittney Griner at Russian Penal Colony

News of WNBA star Brittney Griner’s drug smuggling conviction and nine-and-a-half-year prison sentence was followed last week by news that she had been transferred from her Moscow holding prison to a Russian penal colony.

Now, grim details emerge about the barbaric conditions that await the superstar upon her arrival.

According to Joey Reed, father of Trevor Rowdy Reed, a former U.S. Marine who was arrested for allegedly assaulting two Moscow police officers, rotten food, brutal wardens,  and extreme weather await Griner in her penal colony.

Similar to Griner, Reed’s son spent time in a Moscow detention center after being arrested in August 2019.

After receiving a nine-year sentence, the former Marine was transferred to a penal colony in Mordovia, over 300 miles away. Once there, things became even worse.

“You gotta understand, the labor camps in Mordovia, these are pre-Stalin-era prisons, these were literally referred to as gulags,” Joey Reed told the New York 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.”

Trevor Reed would end up serving nine months of his sentence before being swapped for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted of conspiring to transport more than $100 million of cocaine into New York.

“To a certain extent, you’re starved just by the food that they give you,” Joey Reed explained. “We didn’t show any public photos of my son for about a month and a half because he looked like a concentration camp victim.”

As Breitbart’s Warner Todd Huston reports:

Griner was convicted of importing illegal drugs into Russia in August several months after she was arrested in a Moscow airport for having cannabis oil in a vaping cartridge in her luggage.

While vaping cartridges such as the ones in her luggage would be ignored by many western countries, Russia still has strict laws against marijuana in any form. But more especially, Griner presented Russia with a high-profile political victory against the United States and her conviction was a welcome jab at the U.S. as far as Putin’s government is concerned.

Griner tried to appeal her more than nine-year prison sentence, but the Russian court rejected her attempt to get out from under the sentence.

It is not yet known which penal colony Griner will be assigned to. Nor is it known whether the colony’s location will be made public. The Biden Administration has tried and failed to win Griner’s release. Months ago, it appeared there was traction to do a prisoner swap that would have sent Griner back home in exchange for notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Orban. However, talks of such an exchange seem to have cooled.