List of Concentration and Internment Camps - North Korea

North Korea

North Korea is known to operate six concentration camps, currently accommodating around 200,000 prisoners. These camps, officially called Kwan-li-so (Korean for “control and management center”), are large political panel-labor colonies in secluded mountain valleys of central and northeastern North Korea. Once condemned as political criminals in North Korea, the defendant and his or her family (even little children and old people) are incarcerated in one of the camps without trial and cut off from all outside contact. Prisoners reportedly work 14 hour days at hard labor and ideological re-education. Starvation, torture and disease are commonplace. Political criminals invariably receive life sentences.

Concentration camps came into being in North Korea in the wake of the country's liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II. Those persons considered "adversary class forces", such as landholders, Japanese collaborators, religious devotees and families of those who migrated to the South, were rounded up and detained in large facilities. Additional camps were established later to incarcerate political victims in power struggles in the late 1950s and 60s and their families and overseas Koreans who migrated to the North. The number of camps saw a marked increase later in the course of cementing the Kim Il Sung dictatorship and the Kim Jong-il succession. About a dozen concentration camps were in operation until the early 1990s, but some were closed and merged into the remaining six for better secrecy and control.

Kang Chol-hwan is a former prisoner of Yodok concentration camp and has written a book (The Aquariums of Pyongyang) about his time in the camp. Shin Dong-hyuk is the only person known to have escaped from Kaechon concentration camp and gave an account of his time in the camp.