Labor camp

From Freepedia

A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are engaged in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators.

During Stalinism, labor camps in the Soviet Union were officially called "Corrective labor camps." The term Labor colony; more exactly, "Corrective labor colony", (исправительно-трудовая колония, ИТК), was also in use and referred to camps that housed prisoners with shorter average sentences.

Notable labor camps

• Imperial Russia operated a system of remote Siberian forced labor camps as part of its regular judicial system, called katorga. Though conditions were difficult, they were mild compared to some of the later Stalinist camps.

• The Soviet government took over the already extensive katorga system and expanded it immensely, eventually organizing the Gulag to run the camps. These camps were notorious for their extremely rough conditions; new prisoner death rate was as high as 80% at some camps. During and after the Great Purges, the Gulag camps housed millions of prisoners. Stalin used them both as a source of cheap labor, and as indirect extermination camps. In 1954, a year after Stalin's death, the new Soviet government of Nikita Khrushchev began to release political prisoners and close down the camps. By the end of the 1950s, virtually all "corrective labor camps" were dissolved. Officially, the Gulag was terminated by the MVD order 20 of January 25, 1960. As a matter of fact, labor camps still exist in Russia. Probably the most well-known prisoner there is Mikhail Chodorkovsky, a businessman, former owner of Yukos.

• During the early 20th century, the Empire of Japan used the forced labour of millions of civilians from conquered countries and prisoners of war, especially during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, on projects such as the Death Railway. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a direct result of the overwork, malnutrition, preventable disease and violence which were commonplace on these projects. (See also: Japanese war crimes.)

• Nazis operated many extremely brutal concentration camps, which provided free forced labor for industrial and other jobs during World War II. There were several categories of Arbeitslager in Nazi system, for different categories of inmates.

A notable example is Mittelbau-Dora labor camp complex that serviced the production of the V-2 rocket. See List of German concentration camps for more.

• The Communist Party of China has operated many labor camps for some kinds of crimes. Many leaders of China were put into labor camps after purges, including Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. However, the conditions of the camps in China have changed much and grown milder over time. Prisoners receive education as a form of rehabilitation.

• The Khmer Rouge operated labor camps in Cambodia following their seizure of power, for the "rehabilitation" of the (loosely defined) bourgeois classes.

• In Communist Romania, labour camps were operated for projects such as the building of the Danube-Black Sea Canal and the dessication of the Great Brăila Island, on which enemies of the regime were "re-educated" by forced labour. Most of the people that worked on such projects never got out alive.