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A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (especially prison farms). Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, abolished camps of forced labor. [1]
In the 20th century, a new category of labor camps developed for the imprisonment of millions of people who were not criminals per se, but political opponents (real or imagined) and various so-called undesirables under communist and fascist regimes.
Early-modern states could exploit convicts by combining prison and useful work in manning their galleys. [2] This became the sentence of many Christian captives in the Ottoman Empire [3] and of Calvinists (Huguenots) in pre-Revolutionary France. [4]
The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.
In criminal justice, particularly in North America, correction, corrections, and correctional, are umbrella terms describing a variety of functions typically carried out by government agencies, and involving the punishment, treatment, and supervision of persons who have been convicted of crimes. These functions commonly include imprisonment, parole, and probation. A typical correctional institution is a prison. A correctional system, also known as a penal system, thus refers to a network of agencies that administer a jurisdiction's prisons, and community-based programs like parole, and probation boards. This system is part of the larger criminal justice system, which additionally includes police, prosecution and courts. Jurisdictions throughout Canada and the US have ministries or departments, respectively, of corrections, correctional services, or similarly-named agencies.
A penal colony or exile colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general population by placing them in a remote location, often an island or distant colonial territory. Although the term can be used to refer to a correctional facility located in a remote location, it is more commonly used to refer to communities of prisoners overseen by wardens or governors having absolute authority.
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. The word internment is also occasionally used to describe a neutral country's practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907.
The State Protection Authority was the secret police of the People's Republic of Hungary from 1945 to 1956. The ÁVH was conceived as an external appendage of the Soviet Union's KGB in Hungary responsible for supporting the ruling Hungarian Working People's Party and persecuting political criminals. The ÁVH gained a reputation for brutality during a series of purges but was gradually reined in under the government of Imre Nagy, a moderate reformer, after he was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary in 1953. The ÁVH was dissolved by Nagy's revolutionary government during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and succeeded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs III.
A concentration camp is a form of internment camp for confining political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or minority ethnic groups, on the grounds of state security, or for exploitation or punishment. Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-American citizens by the US during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps, which later morphed into extermination camps, and the Soviet labour camps or gulag.
Katorga was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
Extermination through labour is a term that was adopted to describe forced labor in Nazi concentration camps whose inmates were held in inhumane conditions and suffered a high mortality rate; in some camps most prisoners died within a few months of incarceration. In the 21st century, research has questioned whether there was a general policy of extermination through labor in the Nazi concentration camp system because of widely varying conditions between camps. German historian Jens-Christian Wagner argues that the camp system involved the exploitation of forced labor of some prisoners and the systematic murder of others, especially Jews, with only limited overlap between these two groups.
After the end of World War II, the Central Labour Camp in Potulice became a detention centre for Germans and anti-communist Poles. It was set up by the Soviet and Polish Communist authorities in Potulice in place of the former Nazi German Potulice concentration camp, the subcamp of Stutthof built in 1941. Following liberation by the Red Army, the camp was controlled by the Soviet NKVD Department of Prisoners and Internees until June 1945. Repopulated, it remained in operation until 1949 under the management of the Stalinist Ministry of Public Security of Poland.
Sevvostlag was a system of forced labor camps set up to satisfy the workforce requirements of the Dalstroy construction trust in the Kolyma region in April 1932. Organizationally being part of Dalstroy and under the management of the Labor and Defence Council of Sovnarkom, these camps were formally subordinated to OGPU later the NKVD directorate of the Far Eastern Krai. On March 4, 1938, Sevvostlag was resubordinated to the NKVD GULAG. In 1942 it was resubordinated back to Dalstroy. In 1949 it was renamed to the Directorate of Dalstroy Corrective Labor Camps. In 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin, with the reform of the Soviet penal system, it was again resubordinated to Gulag and later reformed into the Directorate of Far Eastern Corrective Labor Camps Управление Северо-восточных исправительно-трудовых лагерей, УСВИТЛ (USVITL).
Forced labour was used extensively in the Soviet Union and the following categories may be distinguished.
A corrective colony is the most common type of prison in Russia and some other post-Soviet states. Such colonies combine penal detention with compulsory work. The system of labor colonies and camps originated in 1929, and after 1953, the corrective penal colonies in the Soviet Union developed as a post-Stalin replacement of the Gulag labor camp system.
Hwasong concentration camp is a labor camp in North Korea for political prisoners. The official name is Kwan-li-so No. 16.
Prisons in North Korea have conditions that are unsanitary, life-threatening and are comparable to historical concentration camps. A significant number of inmates have died each year, since they are subject to torture and inhumane treatment. Public and secret executions of inmates, including children, especially in cases of attempted escape, are commonplace. Infanticides also often occur. The mortality rate is exceptionally high, because many prisoners die of starvation, illnesses, work accidents, or torture.
Kwalliso (Korean: 관리소) or kwan-li-so is the term for political penal labor and rehabilitation colonies in North Korea. They constitute one of three forms of political imprisonment in the country, the other two being what Washington DC based NGO Committee for Human Rights in North Korea described as "short-term detention/forced-labor centers" and "long-term prison labor camps", for misdemeanor and felony offenses respectively.
The Federal Penitentiary Service is a federal agency of the Ministry of Justice of Russia responsible for correctional services.
The Dubravny Camp, Special Camp No.3, commonly known as the Dubravlag, was a Gulag labor camp of the Soviet Union located in Yavas, Mordovia from 1948 to 2005.
Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir is a 2011 memoir by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky (1918–1999), a Soviet Engineer and eventual Head of numerous Gulag camps in the northern Russian region of Pechorlag, Pechora, from 1940 to 1946. Under the orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Mochulsky oversaw the construction of a 500 km-long rail line from the Pechorlag camps, bordering the Arctic Circle, to central Russia, with a goal to connect "remote Pechora Camps to the outside world". The book was published posthumously by the Oxford University Press in 2011. It is introduced as well as translated and edited by the historical sociologist, Deborah A. Kaple.
A second early modern form of punishment, the galleys, constituted a more direct precedent to the earliest hard labour camps. [...] Galley rowing offered no promise of rehabilitation and, in fact, often led to disease and death. However, it shared with the prison workhouses of northern Europe a new aspiration to integrate hard labour into punishment for the eeconomic benefit of the state.
And what happened to the captives from Ukraine [...]? The slaves functioned at all levels of Ottoman society [...]. At the lowest end of the social scale were galley slaves conscripted into the imperial naval fleet and field hands who labored on Ottoman landed estates.
Andre Zysberg's study shows that [...] nearly 1,500 Huguenots were sentenced to the galleys between 1680 and 1716 [...].