The U.S. State Department still doesn’t know where former WNBA center Brittney Griner is located.
Griner, 32, was reportedly transferred to a labor camp where she will work 16 hours a day.
Griner was convicted on August 4 of smuggling cannabis oil into Russia. Russian media outlets report Griner was moved from a women’s pre-trial detention center to the Russian labor prison after the appeals hearing. She was sentenced to 9 years, but will serve less than 7 years since the court of appeals reduced her sentence.
Russian labor camps in Siberia are known for their harsh conditions that are worse than the women’s detention center in Moscow where Griner was detained since February.
The conditions include rancid food, extreme cold, isolation and wicked wardens, according to the New York Post.
Former US Marine Trevor Rowdy Reed was detained in a Russian prison until he was swapped for a Russian prisoner in the U.S. earlier 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 NY 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.”
Reed said his son lived in dilapidated barracks built of brick and sheet metal. He routinely curled up near hot water pipes to stay warm during freezing temperatures that hovered in the low teens.
Reed said Trevor lost about 50 pounds due to the “horrible” food the prisoners were forced to eat once a day.
The meager chow consisted primarily of potato soup with “some type of fish.” The smell was so foul that even the stray cats wouldn’t eat it, Reed said.
Cats were welcomed in the barracks to keep the rodent population down.
“That’s how bad it is,” Reed said. “There was no real health value to the food.”
Female inmates work 16 hours a day sewing at prison number 22 in Russia’s Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, The Post reports.
Trevor Reed was tossed into solitary because he refused to work, his father said. “They were trying to break my son.”
Trevor went on hunger strikes that lasted 4 or 5 days at a time.
“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.”
Reed said his son is “doing well” now that he is back home in the states. “Trevor speaks fluent Russian now,” his father added.
