North Korea’s Ministry of Social Security has ordered regional offices to conduct one-on-one talks with former inmates recently released as part of a special amnesty issued by North Korean authorities late last month.
This suggests the authorities aim to stop ex-cons — freed from their isolation — from becoming threats to regime stability by preventing potential “ideological laxity” on their part, especially amid growing public suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a Daily NK source in Gangwon Province on Monday, the Ministry of Social Security issued the order to its regional branches on Thursday, calling on the branches to document their chats and send the materials to Pyongyang.
Security authorities said the measure aimed for local branches to assume responsibility for settling the ex-inmates. They also called on officials to highlight the magnanimous policies of the party and state, which have opened the way for former prisoners to rehabilitate themselves. Essentially, they underscored how officials should promote regime solidarity by encouraging the ex-inmates to feel the authorities will take care of them to the very end.
However, the order also called on officials to get the released prisoners to talk about “additional crimes confessed to them” by fellow inmates when they were institutionalized.
The released prisoners were also asked why they believed those excluded from the pardon received little or no official mercy, with the interviewer listing the names of unpardoned prisoners.
This appears to be a typical North Korean-style “policy of alienation” that breeds jealousy and enmity between released prisoners and those that remain confined, with the former informing authorities about the ideological problems of the latter.
That is to say, the source believes the authorities’ real intention with their individual discussions is to ferret out ideological malcontents who have made statements of enmity towards the party or state, suffer from “delusions” regarding capitalism, or have expressed distrust of the regime.
North Korean authorities are also demanding that ex-prisoners tell them everything about fellow prisoners with “wayward ideological tendencies.”
Thus, while the authorities may have considered the possibility that prisoners can “reform themselves,” they are also compiling objective, detailed analysis of the ideological tendencies of prisoners as a contingency.
Meanwhile, the country’s corrections bureau will send the analysis data to security personnel at prisons across the country once the Ministry of Social Security collects it. This means ideologically wayward inmates will be subject to even tighter surveillance and supervision.
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