The very scary prison life the New York Times once envisioned for the criminal Aleksei Navalny seems to differ from the reality he now describes.
New York Times – March 1 2021
‘Your Personality Deforms’: Navalny Sent to Notoriously Harsh Prison
by Andrew E. Kramer and Steven Erlanger
Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition politician, is going to serve his prison sentence in a penal colony notorious for disciplinary measures considered harsh even by Russian standards, Russian news outlets reported on Monday.
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The site, Penal Colony No. 2 and also known by its initials IK2, is in the Vladimir Region in European Russia east of Moscow, indicating Mr. Navalny will not serve his sentence in the country’s harshest prisons in Siberia or the Arctic.But the colony is known for strict enforcement of rules and for making extensive use of a separate, harsher, punishment facility within its walls where inmates are not allowed to mingle or even talk among themselves, according to former inmates and lawyers.
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While guards oversee the prison, fellow prisoners maintain discipline within the brigades, either in cooperation with guards, a group known as “activists,” or as criminal gang leaders, known as “thieves in law.”Penal Colony No. 2 is controlled by activists in cahoots with the warden, according to former inmates, an arrangement that will allow the prison administration to strictly control Mr. Navalny’s life at all times. Activist-controlled prisons are called “red zone” facilities, in Russian prison parlance.
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All the same, at Penal Colony No. 2, activists command fellow prisoners to perform meaningless tasks such as making beds multiple times a day, or undressing and then dressing again, according to accounts of former convicts.Dmitri Dyomushkin, a nationalist politician who served time in the colony, described conditions in the separate punishment brigade, where Mr. Navalny could wind up for infractions as minor as failing to button his jacket, as psychologically harrowing.
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Inmates spend hours standing with their hands clasped behind their backs, looking at their feet, forbidden from making eye contact with the guards, Mr. Dyomushkin said in an interview on the Echo of Moscow radio station.
Some four month later the above propaganda collided with reality.
New York Times – August 25 2021
In First Interview From Jail, an Upbeat Navalny Discusses Prison Life
By Andrew E. Kramer
Russia’s most famous prisoner, the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, spends much of his time sweeping the prison yard, reading letters in his cellblock and visiting the mess for meals, with porridge often on the menu.
But perhaps the most maddening thing, he suggested, is being forced to watch Russian state TV and selected propaganda films for more than eight hours a day in what the authorities call an “awareness raising” program that has replaced hard labor for political prisoners.
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Mr. Navalny described five daily sessions of television watching for inmates, the first starting immediately after morning calisthenics, breakfast and sweeping the yard.After some free time, there’s a two-hour spell in front of the screen, lunch, then more screen time, dinner, and then more TV time in the evening. During one afternoon session, playing chess or backgammon is an acceptable alternative.
“We watch films about the Great Patriotic War,” Mr. Navalny said, referring to World War II, “or how one day, 40 years ago, our athletes defeated the Americans or Canadians.”
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“Everything is organized so that I am under maximum control 24 hours a day,” Mr. Navalny said. He said he had not been assaulted or threatened by fellow inmates but estimated that about one-third were what are known in Russian prisons as “activists,” those who serve as informants to the warden.
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He said he gets along well with other inmates in his cellblock, whom he described as shaven-headed men wearing prison uniforms. Sometimes, they cook snacks in a microwave.
'I am forced to watch TV,' claims the notorious liar Navalny while preparing his snacks in a microwave. Those are really bad conditions the convicted criminal has to live in.
Just compare those to the excellent life presumably innocent people experience in New York City while waiting for their trials:
A detainee was stabbed. A correction officer was slashed. And another person who was incarcerated at Rikers Island had scalding water thrown on him, causing second-degree burns all over his body.
The episodes were included in a letter that a federal monitor filed with a court on Tuesday that described “unreasonably high” levels of violence this summer at Rikers, New York City’s vast jail complex.
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Most of those being held at Rikers, as well as those in other city jails, are awaiting trial. There are currently close to 6,000 people in custody in the city’s jails; more than three-quarters of them have yet to be tried, and are presumed innocent.
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Mary Lynne Werlwas, the director of the Prisoner’s Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, whose 2011 lawsuit led to the federal monitor, said in an interview that the city’s jails were more dangerous today than they had been at any time in the past 50 years.“The city has completely lost control and as a result, people are not being protected from violence and are locked in the housing areas for days with no food, showers, access to lawyers or medical visits,” she said.
But Russian prisons are baaaad!