After her requests for parole and a prison transfer were recently denied, a member of the Russian punk rock collective Pussy Riot was hospitalized following a five-day hunger strike.

Three members of Pussy Riot were arrested in March 2012 and sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism incited by religious hatred.” Now, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23, has been placed in the medical ward of a penal colony in Mordovia, southeast of Moscow, where she is serving her sentence. Her only sustenance for five days has been water.

In a lengthy letter to the news site Lenta (a translated version was published in London’s The Guardian), Tolokonnikova described “slave labor” and unsanitary conditions in which women work through sickness and injury up to 17 hours a day and are beaten — or worse — for failing to complete their duties.

“I am going on hunger strike and refusing to participate in colony slave labor,” she wrote. “I will do this until the administration starts obeying the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle ejected from the realm of justice for the purpose of stoking the production of the sewing industry; until they start treating us like humans.”

Tolokonnikova is scheduled to be released in March. For more information, visit CNN.