***** Riot member on hunger strike

[TheDemSocialist]

A jailed member of Russian punk-rock band ***** Riot said that she was starting a hunger strike on Monday to protest "slave labor" in her penal colony and that she had received a death threat from a senior prison official.Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years in prison last year after performing what the band called a "punk prayer" in a Moscow cathedral during a protest against President Vladimir Putin that came amid street demonstrations against his rule.
"Beginning Sept. 23, I am going on hunger strike and refusing to participate in colony slave labor," she wrote in a letter circulated by her husband, Pyotr Verzilov.
"I will do this until the administration starts obeying the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle," she wrote. Tolokonnikova is in Penal Colony No. 14 in the Mordovia region, southeast of Moscow, where she said inmates were forced to work up to 17 hours per day sewing police uniforms.
She said workers received no more than four hours of sleep per night and that prison officials used senior inmates to enforce order in a system reminiscent of Soviet-era Gulag labor camps.
Tolokonnikova added that collective punishment, increasing production quotas and cases of violence against those who failed to deliver were common at her penal colony. She also said living conditions failed to meet human-rights standards and Russian law.
"Your hands are pierced with needles and covered in scratches. Your blood is all over the work table, but still you keep sewing," she wrote.

Read more @: ***** Riot member on hunger strike | Al Jazeera America

I wish her the best of luck on her mission. Hopefully this will bring the worlds attention to these issues.