Brittney Griner has a new home in a Russian prison after she was convicted of cannabis possession and smuggling on Thursday and sentenced to nine years in prison. There are pictures of Griner’s possible new home locked up in Russian prison via the New York Post;
While it’s not clear exactly where she will be serving out her unusually harsh sentence — which she is appealing — Griner may return to the female penal facility where she has spent the last six months outside of Moscow.
The prison, dubbed Correctional Colony No. 1 or IK-1, is no Stalin-era gulag but seems bleak at best.
The facility is a former orphanage, rebuilt and converted ten years ago into a pretrial detention center and prison where women live out their sentences, the New York Times reported last month.
Located in the village of Novoye Grishino, the overwhelmingly gray and artificially lit prison has its own sewing factory and Russian Orthodox church inside.
Video footage of the facility shows towering gray walls topped with barbed wire and gives a glimpse inside of the sewing factory where dozens of women appear to be working.
A large, rusting statue of Lenin sits in a snow-filled courtyard.
Journalist Yekaterina Kalugina visited Griner while she was at the facility and told The Times that each day is repetitive and monotonous for the Phoenix Mercury Center.
Each morning inmates wake up, and eat a basic meal in her cell, Kalugina said. They are then permitted to walk around the courtyard. They then spend the rest of the day either reading books or watching Russian television.
If Griner is forced to stay there for the entire nine years, it will be a miserable existence. She is just going to have to take it day by day and hope that her celebrity status gets her home. There are a lot of Americans in jail in Russia for similar things who have no hope of getting home.
Flip to the next page to see the photos and video of the jail that Griner will likely be staying in.
