IK-17 PRISON COLONY
Jimmy is being held in IK 17 in Mordovia, Russia. “Prisons in Mordovia are notoriously terrible, even by Russian standards.
The prisons there are known for the harsh regimes and human rights violations,” said Olga Zeveleva, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki who specializes in Russian prison conditions as part of the Gulag Echoes project. “It is a place any prisoner wants to avoid,” Zeveleva said | "... a sprawling network of penal colonies in the north-west of the Mordovia region, about 300 miles east of Moscow. The prisons were built in the early 1930s as part of the gulag system of the Stalin era and together make up one of the largest penal complexes in Europe." (The Guardian Nov 18, 2022)
Today, Russia is more repressive than it has ever been in the post-Soviet era. The authorities crack down on critical media, harass peaceful protesters, engage in smear campaigns against independent groups, and stifle them with fines. Foreign organizations are increasingly banned as “undesirable,” and Russian nationals and organizations are penalized for supposed involvement with them. A new law enables Russian authorities to partially or fully block access to the internet in Russia in the event of undefined “security threats” and gives the government control of the country’s internet traffic, enhancing its capacity to conduct fine-grain censorship. Impunity for egregious abuses by security officials in Chechnya remains rampant. - Human Rights Watch