Life for the former WNBA star Brittney Griner is looking bleak. The woman who called for the US National Anthem to stop being played at WNBA games is now living inside a Russian gulag… a work camp, where she is about to deal with some very nasty living conditions. Word on the street is that Brittney will be facing 16-hour workdays. And I am sure the work will not be easy, either. These prisons are also well-known for abuse.
Scary.
The Free Beacon reported that WNBA star Brittney Griner will face 16-hour work days and possible abuse as she serves her nine-year sentence for drug smuggling in one of Russia’s harshest penal colonies, according to TMZ Sports.
After Griner was sentenced in October, Russian officials transferred the athlete to the Mordovia region’s IK-2 female penal colony, originally built in the 1930s as part of the Stalin-era gulag system. While the prison has improved since then, it is still characterized by brutality and harsh conditions.
“Prisons in Mordovia are notoriously terrible, even by Russian standards. The prisons there are known for the harsh regimes and human rights violations,” Olga Zeveleva, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki who specializes in Russian prison conditions, told the Guardian.
President Joe Biden has promised to continue negotiating a prisoner swap with Russia, offering convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout for Griner and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan.
“My intention is to get [Griner] home,” Biden said a day after the midterm elections. “We’ve had a number of discussions so far, and I’m hopeful that now that our election is over, there’s a willingness to negotiate more specifically with us.” Biden has yet to reach an agreement with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Some analysts hope Griner’s high-profile status will shield her from abuse, Zeveleva said, but others fear Russia’s war with Ukraine and the United States’ support for Ukraine could make life worse for Griner.
“In times of war, the rules might be different. … In any case, she won’t have a pleasant time there,” Zeveleva said.
I don’t like to see anybody suffer, trust me, I am a softy when it comes to this stuff, even though Brittney is getting a karma/life lesson right now. The bottom line is that she broke the law. And while I understand that some people might think this punishment is unfairly harsh, that’s tough luck. This is another country, and they have rules and run their country how they see fit. As Americans, we don’t get to decide what rules we follow and which ones we don’t.
If you go to another country, it’s your responsibility to read up on the rules and the laws. And I’d imagine that Brittney, who had been to Russia many times prior to her arrest, was well aware of the laws pertaining to Marijuana, but she’s an entitled, spoiled liberal, so of course, she felt that the rules didn’t apply to her.
That’s my take, anyway.
So, while, yes, I do feel for her, I also believe she broke the law, admitted to it, and now she had to pay the price.
I don’t know if Biden will ever be able to get hr out, to be honest. Time will tell.
In the meantime, she has a very hard and horrible road ahead of her. I hope she makes it through and learns a lesson about how wonderful America truly is, anthem and all.
This post originally appeared on WayneDupree.com.