Prisons in North Korea

These labor training facilities were also used in response to the black market activity that resulted in people searching for food throughout the countryside.

[11][citation not found] In 2004, these “labor training” facilities were made a regular form of punishment under the new reforms of the criminal code which included a list of economic and social crimes.

[15] Lee Soon-ok gave detailed testimony on her treatment in the North Korean prison system to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 2002.

"[16] Many other former inmates, including Kang Chol-hwan and Shin Dong-hyuk, gave detailed and consistent testimonies on the human rights crimes in North Korean prison camps.

Both in prisons and re-education camps have series of cruel methods such as mass executions, abuse, torture, malnutrition and disease were rampant in isolated North Korean society.

However, in 1994 the family responsibility principle was limited to cases of especially hideous crimes such as writing anti-government graffiti, which represented a substantial improvement by North Korean standards.

[20][21] It has been estimated that a quarter of its population, with millions of people are still political prisoners, one-third of them are children, and they are routinely forced to perform slave labor, tortured, and raped.

The prisoners of all ages including the sick and the elderly are forced to perform hard and dangerous slave work with primitive means in mining and agriculture.

Along with the hard work, the small food rations cause a huge number of the prisoners to die including men, women, children and babies.

North Korean prisoners thought that eating at home was considered treacherous as cooking their own food was illegal as the consequences of being caught by guards were serious, even fatal.

North Korean prisoners and their families including children are forced to eat thin, gruel-like porridge that wasn't enough to survive and millions of people faced starvation in the camps, even the village co-operatives which became a network of executions and unending purges.

During the height of the famine in the mid to late 1990s, thousands of North Koreans crossed the border into China in search of food or jobs to support their families back home.

If it was determined that those who fled to China had any contact with South Koreans or Protestant Christian organizations, they were sent to labor colonies or gyohwaso (felony-level penitentiaries).

[34] The South Korean human rights activist Shin Dong-hyuk is the only person known to have escaped from Kaechon Political Prison Camp.

[39][citation not found] In December 2016, the South China Morning Post reported on the existence of a secret prison in Hyanghari, which is euphemistically known as a 'resort,' where members of the country's political elite are imprisoned.