Multiple Daily NK sources have reported that the Central Committee’s Justice Department recently presented a “new corrections policy” to the Ministry of Social Security’s Corrections Bureau, an agency that operates North Korea’s detention facilities.
The new policy reportedly reflects North Korea’s law to eradicate “reactionary thought and culture.”
According to a Daily NK source in Pyongyang on Tuesday, five officials — including the deputy director of the Justice Department — convened a meeting at the office of the director of the Corrections Bureau at the bureau’s headquarters on Mar. 26.
The Justice Department ordered the new corrections policy during the meeting.
The source said the new policy added four separate rules that apply to prisoners punished for violations of the law to eradicate reactionary thought and culture, such as consuming cultural products from “enemy countries” or using foreign-made mobile phones.
More specifically, prisoners incarcerated for violations of the law on reactionary thought and culture should:
- Be kept separate from first-time offenders;
- Be kept under close watch;
- Be restricted from seeing family and friends (no visits for first six months of sentence, and only one visit per year);
- Be given the toughest forced labor assignments.
Essentially, violators of the law on reactionary thought and culture face double punishment.
The Justice Department stressed that the Corrections Bureau “should never trust prisoners, especially those who are in for breaking the law on reactionary thought and culture.” Warning that such prisoners have a “different brain structure,” the department called on prison officials to keep close track of what the prisoners are saying and thinking and give them “labor tougher than death” to show what happens when people run afoul of the law on reactionary thought and culture.
Accordingly, the Corrections Bureau has sent orders to implement the new policy to corrections and security departments of prisons and labor camps across the country.
A source in South Pyongan Province said Kaechon Labor Camp received the Justice Department’s new policy directive on Mar. 27.
He added that camp officials apparently said that many people from Yanggang Province end up in the camp, and that those prisoners should be punished harder because “their heads are full of reactionary thought and they could spread corrupted ideology even in prison just by opening their mouths.”
In fact, the Corrections Bureau reportedly ordered prison camps to “mercilessly” subject prisoners sentenced for violations of the reactionary thought law to solitary confinement if they make “even slightly” ideologically problematic statements, and to exclude ideological hard cases from pardons and shortened sentences.
The source said now even the corrections and security departments at prisons refuse to take bribes from the families of prisoners who violated the law to eradicate reactionary thought and culture.
Another source in North Korea told Daily NK that at prisons where people from Yanggang Province and Pyongyang are sent, such as Kangdong Labor Camp and Hamhung Labor Camp, prison authorities have responded to the order by reassigning violators of the law on reactionary thought and culture from easy jail yard tasks to hard work in vegetable and rice fields.
For example, about 20 first-time male offenders at Kangdong Labor Camp were sent deep into the mines with the prison’s repeat offenders, the source said.
Daily NK also understands that the Justice Department warned that prison camps nationwide will be subject to regular inspections to review how they are carrying out the new policy.
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