EAI Asia Security Initiative Working Paper No. 5

Author

Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor at the University of California, San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He is the author of The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000) and coauthor of The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995) and Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (Columbia University Press, 2007). He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Marcus Noland is the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he is also a senior fellow. He has been associated with the Institute since 1985. He was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States and has held research or teaching positions at Yale University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern California, Tokyo University, Saitama University (now the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies), the University of Ghana, the Korea Development Institute, and the East-West Center. Noland is the author of Korea after Kim Jong-il (2004) and Avoiding the Apocalypse:The Future of the Two Koreas (2000), which won the 2000–2001 Ohira Memorial Award, and coauthor of Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (Columbia University Press, 2007).

Abstract

The penal system has played a central role in the North Korean government’s response to the country’s profound economic and social changes. As the informal market economy has expanded, so have the scope of economic crimes. Two refugee surveys—one conducted in China, one in South Korea—document that the regime disproportionately targets politically suspect groups, particularly those involved in market-oriented economic activities. Levels of violence and deprivation do not appear to differ substantially between the infamous political prison camps, penitentiaries for felons, and labor camps used to incarcerate individuals for a growing number of economic crimes. Such a system may also reflect ulterior motives. High levels of discretion with respect to arrest and sentencing and very high costs of detention, arrest, and incarceration encourage bribery; the more arbitrary and painful the experience with the penal system, the easier it is for officials to extort money for avoiding it. These characteristics not only promote regime maintenance through intimidation, but may facilitate predatory corruption as well.

Keywords: prison camps, corruption, North Korea, refugees

Introduction

During the 1990s, a famine in North Korea killed between 600,000 and 1,000,000 people, 3 to 5 percent of the population (Haggard and Noland 2007). As the state proved unable to provide food through the socialist distribution network, the economy underwent a process of marketization from below. Small-scale social units—households, factories and cooperatives, local government and party offices, even military units—engaged in entrepreneurial behavior in order to survive. Much of this behavior was technically illegal.

This unplanned and unwanted marketization resulted from the coping strategies of citizens and was not overtly political. But it also eroded state control of the economy and therefore over pathways to wealth, prestige, and ultimately power; it even threatened to create an independent civil society around unregulated market relations. Not surprisingly, the regime’s response to this process has been ambivalent at best. At times, the government acquiesced to the facts on the ground and decriminalized or tolerated market activity out of sheer necessity. At other times, the government sought to reconstitute the socialist system through a revival of the state sector and the imposition of controls on private activity, most recently through a confiscatory currency reform announced on November 30, 2009 (Haggard and Noland 2010a).

The penal system has played a central role in the government’s response to these economic and social changes. During the famine, the regime established an extensive system of low-level labor training facilities (ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae). These facilities were used to incarcerate those caught crossing the border into China or repatriated by Chinese authorities, movements that increased in the wake of the famine. However, labor-training facilities were also used to punish the unprecedented level of internal movement and market activity that sprung up as heavily affected segments of the population wandered the countryside in search of food (Noland 2000).

The 2004 reform of the criminal code regularized these facilities and specified “labor training” for up to two years as punishment for a growing number of economic and social crimes (Han 2006). A further set of amendments to the criminal code in 2007 lengthened the list of these crimes and increased punishments for them.

We draw on two refugee surveys—one conducted in China, the other in South Korea—to draw a picture of the changing political economy of the North Korean penal system. Respondents portray a judicial and penal system characterized by high rates of arbitrary detention and release. Horrific abuses are characteristic not only of the camps for political prisoners, but are found at all levels of the penal system. In the survey of more than 1,300 refugees conducted in China between August 2004 and September 2005, nearly 10 percent reported incarceration in political and correctional detention facilities. Among this group, 90 percent reported witnessing forced starvation, 60 percent deaths due to beating or torture, and 27 percent executions. These findings are broadly confirmed by a second survey of 300 refugees conducted in South Korea in November 2008, which also included more detailed questions about initial arrest and detention, the types of facilities in which respondents were held, and the conditions they witnessed while incarcerated.

The emerging portrait of the North Korean penal system suggests a vast machine that processes large numbers of people engaged in illicit activities for relatively short periods, but which exposes them to terrible abuses while incarcerated. This pattern serves to effectively intimidate; our surveys reveal an atomized society in which barriers to collective action are high and overt political opposition minimal. However, repression has not served to eliminate market-oriented activity, in part because of the continuing poor economic performance of the regime. Rather, our surveys suggest a changing political economy in which corrupt officials extract bribes from those in the market, exploiting their ability to limit entanglement with a brutal penal system.

Methodologically, refugee surveys are susceptible to well-known problems of selection bias. Those who undertake the risks of trying to leave North Korea may have more adverse experiences with the regime, which could give rise to behaviors and attitudes that are quite different from the population as a whole. Because crossing the border has historically been seen as a very serious crime, those incarcerated for attempting to exit could have faced particularly severe punishment. The survey may thus accurately capture the experiences of the refugee communities in China and South Korea, but provide only a limited perspective on North Korea.

However, there are some reasons to believe that the sources of bias are somewhat less pronounced than might be thought. We can also reduce at least some sources of bias with multivariate statistical techniques that control for possible demographic or even experiential determinants of political attitudes. Refugees are asked questions not only about their own experience but their observation of others’ experiences as well. Refugees’ experience with the prison system may also not be unique. There is strong evidence that the punishment of border crossing now resembles the punishment of a widening array of other economic and social crimes associated with the growth of markets.

We begin with a brief overview of the North Korean penal system before turning to a descriptive overview of respondents’ experiences with it. A striking finding 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, including the work camps established to handle lower-level economic crimes.

We then explore some of the determinants of incarceration. The repressive apparatus disproportionately targets those involved in economic activities beyond direct state control, at a rate more than half again as high as the general population. These findings are consistent with the expansive definition of economic crime contained in the 2004 and 2007 changes in the North Korean criminal code. In the last two sections, we use the surveys to provide a more detailed analysis of the emerging North Korean political economy, noting the effectiveness of repression in stilling overt dissent but its inability to eradicate market activity and corruption...(Continued)  

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the Smith Richardson and MacArthur Foundations. The piece was greatly improved by extensive comments on an earlier draft received from Nick Eberstadt, David Hawk, seminar participants at the Japanese National Graduate Institute for Policy Sciences and the Korea Development Institute, and two anonymous reviewers. We thank Jennifer Lee and Jihyeon Jeong for diligent research assistance and Dan Pinkston and Chung Tae-un for their assistance in conducting the South Korean refugee survey.

This paper is a reprint of the Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper.