It is sometimes called Tŭkchang concentration camp (Hangeul: 득장 제18호 관리소, also Deukjang or Dukjang).
The camp is in Pukchang County and Tukchang district, P'yŏngan-namdo province in North Korea.
They are classified as politically unreliable and are imprisoned without any lawsuit or conviction solely on the basis of kinship.
[7] Kim Yong reported the presence of foreign prisoners (7 old people he asserts to be POWs from the Korean war and a Japanese woman either a repatriate [8] or an abductee [9] ), but there is no other source to confirm this.
[10] Pukchang camp isolates people from society who are deemed by the North Korean government to be politically unreliable.
Within the camp borders, there are at least five coal mines,[11] where all capable prisoners have to work from early in the morning to late in the evening.
[16] Kim reported that in the 1990s her family only received 7 kg (15 lb) of corn per month and occasionally some bean paste (Doenjang), or salt.
[19] Since the prisoners have to work 16–18 hours in the mines every day without any protection, after a few years most suffer from pneumoconiosis and many die from it.
The satellite images, however, show that the mine inside the camp is still operating with civilian laborers.