By David Hawk. This report describes a number of penal institutions in the DPRK administered by two different North Korean police agencies: the People’s Safety Agency and the more political National Security Agency. It outlines two distinct systems of repression: first, a North Korean gulag of forced-labor colonies, camps, and prisons where scores of thousands of prisoners — some political, some convicted felons — are worked, many to their deaths, in mining, logging, farming, and industrial enterprises, often in remote valleys located in the mountainous areas of North Korea; and second, a system of smaller, shorter-term detention facilities along the North Korea–China border used to brutally punish North Koreans who flee to China — usually in search of food during the North Korean famine crisis of the middle to late 1990s — but are arrested by Chinese police and forcibly repatriated to the DPRK.
Source: U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea
