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HONOLULU (Oct. 6) – North Korea’s brutal prison system has long played a central role in the regime’s suppression of political dissent. But a new report based on surveys of North Korean refugees reveals that the country’s penal system also appears to have been increasingly used as a means to terrorize – and extract bribes from – citizens engaging in private economic activity as a survival tactic following the deadly famine of the late 1990s and ongoing food shortages.

In their recently released East-West Center Working Paper Repression and Punishment in North Korea: Survey Evidence of Prison Camp Experiences, EWC Senior Fellow Marcus Noland and UC San Diego Professor Stephan Haggard detail the results of two unique refugee surveys—one conducted in China, one in South Korea—that document the changing role of the North Korean penal system.

“The portrait that emerges is of a Soviet-style gulag characterized by an arbitrary judicial system, an expansive conception of crime, and horrific abuses,” write Haggard and Noland, who is also Deputy Director of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

One particularly striking finding, they write, “is that the conditions that are frequently seen as characteristic of the country’s infamous gulag of political penal-labor colonies –such as extreme deprivation and exposure to violence – in fact pertain across the penal system, from the penitentiaries designed to house felons to lower-level jails [used to punish] a widening array of other economic and social crimes that are associated with the process we describe as ‘marketization from below.’”

Even among the refugees who said they had been imprisoned for relatively brief periods at lower-level penal facilities, a substantial number reported witnessing such abuses as forced starvation, deprivation of medical care, deaths due to beating or torture, and public executions.

The frequency of abuse appears surprisingly uniform over the different institutions, the authors report, a point that is particularly underscored when the generally shorter sentences in the lower level facilities are taken into account.

“The penal system appears to process large numbers of people engaged in illicit activities for relatively short periods, exposing inmates to terrible abuses,” Noland and Haggard write. “This pattern not only serves to intimidate; other research we have conducted on the pervasiveness of corruption suggests that abusive treatment may also benefit corrupt officials extracting bribes from those seeking to avoid entanglement with the penal system.”

"This is a system for shaking people down," Noland said in an Oct. 5 Washington Post article on the report. "It really looks like the work of a gang, a kind of 'Soprano' state. But it succeeds in keeping people repressed."

Noland and Haggard write that the changes in the North Korean prison system must be understood in the context of the profound economic and social changes that have occurred in the country over the last decade, and the government’s repressive response to them.

“As the state proved unable to provide food through socialist distribution networks,” Noland and Haggard write, “…small-scale social units—households, factories and cooperatives, local government and party offices, even military units—began engaging in entrepreneurial behavior—much of it technically illegal—in order to survive… As the state has attempted to reassert control over society in the decade since the end of the famine, the penal system has evolved accordingly.”

Along with satellite imagery and other evidence of the North Korean prison system, Noland and Haggard’s report is based on two surveys of refugees, the first conducted at 11 sites in China in 2004 and 2005 and the second conducted last year in South Korea. Nearly 1,350 people were interviewed in the China survey, and 300 in South Korea.

The scholars acknowledge that the surveys are susceptible to some bias since “refugees may leave precisely because of the intensity of their ill-treatment and disaffection.” However, they note, there are some reasons to believe that the sources of bias are somewhat less pronounced than might be thought, since refugees were asked questions not only about their own experience but their observation of the treatment of others.

In addition, Noland pointed out, when asked about a specific practice that has been alleged in some of the prison facilities of forced abortions or the killing of newborns, just 5 percent of the respondents who had been in such facilities indicated that they had witnessed these practices. According to the authors, “This pattern of a high rate of affirmative response to general phenomena such as hunger in the prison system and a much lower response on the highly specific practice of infanticide suggests respondents were not simply providing the answers they believed interviewers wanted to hear.”

“This reassurance makes the response to a final question all the more chilling,” they add. “When asked if they believed that prisoners were used in medical experimentation … 55 percent of the respondents believed (but did not necessarily witness) that this had occurred at the facilities in which they were incarcerated.”

“There is much about this system that we do not understand,” Noland and Haggard concede. “However, this brief review of the development of the criminal and penal system and evidence from two surveys does shed some additional light on the nature of repression in North Korea …  In combination, these findings provide insight into how to think about North Korean politics, and the centrality of discretion and terror to the maintenance of the regime’s power.”

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The EAST-WEST CENTER is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center contributes to a peaceful, prosperous and just Asia Pacific community by serving as a vigorous hub for cooperative research, education and dialogue on critical issues of common concern to the Asia Pacific region and the United States. Funding for the Center comes from the U.S. government, with additional support provided by private agencies, individuals, foundations, corporations and the governments of the region.

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다음을 첨부 파일로 보냅니다.

East-West Center Working Paper

Repression and Punishment in North Korea  :

Survey Evidence of Prison Camp Experiences