According to the testimony of Jo Chung-hee, a former member of North Korea's Communist Party turned Christian, the country has six labor camps where religious leaders (mostly Christians) and political dissidents are held captive. In 2008, there were 900,000 inmates, but many have since died of starvation.
Christian inmates make up about 20 % of those who have been detained for more than a decade. Many of the inmates have no hope of getting out alive, as North Korean ideology considers a criminal guilty "for at least three generations."
According to Jo's information, the regime runs six labor camps, of which Camp 14, known as the "district of full control", is the worst. This means that its 50,000 prisoners will work there until they die.
Camp #25 is run by North Korea's secret police and is believed to hold petty criminals, religious leaders, alleged Western spies and their families.
Few have ever made it out of these camps alive. Although the average sentence is 15 years, life expectancy from incarceration is only seven years in this place where torture and hard physical labor are the order of the day. Up to three generations of entire families have experienced being detained with work in heavy industry and coal mining.
After the Korean War (1950-53), Kim Il-sung, North Korea's first president and "father of the country" ordered the creation of labor camps for South Korean prisoners of war to be controlled and exploited.
Within five years, political dissidents and anti-regime protesters began filling the camps, especially priests and religious believers, especially Christians, for their opposition to the regime.
According to data published in 2008, there were around 900,000 people in such camps.
The current lower number of prisoners is due to the high mortality rate resulting from the 2009 famine and humanitarian crisis, which the communist regime completely ignored.
Source: Asianews
