The bespectacled, bearded Crimean Tatar community leader is a devout Muslim. He said most of the meals he was served contained pork, the consumption of which is forbidden in Islam. “I just took bread, it wasn’t of good quality, and ate it with tea,” Dzhelyal, who had been sentenced to 17 years in jail for “blowing up a natural gas pipeline” and “smuggling explosives” in a trial Ukraine called Kremlin-orchestrated, told Al Jazeera. He denied all the allegations against him.

Within days after arriving in the drab town of Minusinsk, his diet got marginally better. Breakfasts were tasteless, unsweetened gruel, suppers contained fish, and only one of the lunch dishes was with pork. But diet is by far not the biggest problem tens of thousands of Muslims face in Russia’s notoriously cruel penitentiary system. For almost a century, Soviet and Russian jails have been described as a dark underworld governed by unwritten laws. Hardened criminals known as “crowned thieves” or “the black caste” still sport elaborate tattoos, speak a sophisticated slang, and maintain a strict, ruthless hierarchy with themselves on top.

The jails they control are known as “black prisons”, where wardens collude with “crowned thieves” and turn a blind eye to drug smuggling, card games and extreme violence. “Red prisons” are the ones where wardens hold sway. Here, career criminals have accused prison officials of inhumane conditions including torture, solitary confinement, malnutrition and rape. But in the past two decades, a third force has begun affecting Russia’s prison population as tens of thousands of Muslims have been convicted of “terrorism”, “extremism”, or other crimes. About 15 percent of Russia’s population of 143 million is Muslim. They represent the fastest-growing demographic amid a population decline. Muslim inmates constitute roughly the same percentage of the prison population – 31,000 out of 206,000, Russian Mufti Albir Krganov reportedly said in November 2024. (Al Jazeera/Reuters)