Designed to Oppress: The Architecture of the North Korean Prison Camp Archipelago
North Korea has consistently denied the existence of political prison camps. Yet, defectors and intelligence agencies report that the regime has long attempted to conceal and camouflage them. Former guards report that they are even trained to destroy evidence of the camps in case of an invasion, as the Germans had done in the final months of World War II. Likewise, in a future scenario of a regime collapse, if North Korean leaders are to be convicted on grounds of the human rights atrocities committed in political prison camps, complications may arise in future court proceedings, surrounding the question of “what is the material evidence to say that this was a political prison camp and that such atrocities happened inside?” Despite the compendium of North Korean defector testimonies, the David Irving Trials illustrate that victims of concentration camps’ testimonies can be challenged by a denier’s assertion that there is no physical evidence to support their testimonies. Such assertions could be used in favor of the North Korean leaders’ defense.
This paper will claim that the architecture of North Korean political prison camps is designed to oppress. In other words, the arrangement of space within the camps and the internal structure of the buildings are designed to instill hopelessness, rob the prisoners of dignity, and foster an environment where crimes against humanity can flourish. Acknowledging the dearth of information on individual categories of camps, this paper will identify the common architectural features among not only North Korean political penal-labor colonies (Kwan-Li-So), but also the broader “prison archipelago” by analyzing timelapse satellite imagery of ten prison camps, including long-term prison-pabor facilities (Kyo-Hwa-So), provincial detention centers (Jip-kyul-so) and Interrogation Facilities (Ku-ryu-jang). Referencing literature on architecture theory, penal architecture, refugee camps, biopolitics and Agamben’s theory of state of exception, the paper will assess the collective effect of the prison architecture on prisoners, by examining defector memoirs, testimonies, and drawings.
What is Architecture and the Essence of the North Korean Prison Archipelago?
Architecture is a product of the mind. In his landmark treatise, De Architetura, Virtruvius defined architecture as a structure that unites durability, utility and beauty. Norwegian architect Arne Gunnarsjaa claimed that it is the art of providing an answer to a problem, through visual form. Postmodernist architects defined it as a project that rejects tradition and creates forms with the singular purpose of novelty. Amid myriads of definitions, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, provided one answer to “what is architecture?” by responding to “what is philosophy?,” claiming that philosophy was “the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts.” From this spirit, Leslie Fairweather, a pioneering specialist in penal architecture, claimed that architecture “distinguishes itself from mere building and design by holding and promulgating the nature of man, how people may live together and the aspirations they might have.”
Hence, prison architecture can be seen as the manifestation of a society’s penal philosophy in relation to criminals. Reflecting the ideas of “impersonality and uniformity” that characterized an “industrial response to crimes” in the 20th century, prisons in the US and UK were designed as “back-to-back interior cellhouses, arranged in tiers and enveloped in enormous blocks.” This changed in the UK, following the publication of the Government White Paper “Penal Practice in a Changing Society” in 1959. Long open-tiered cell blocks, common in prisons that represented the “traditional idea of a security prison,” were replaced with new cell blocks with separate, solid floors and more intimate grouping of cells, ensuring the prisoners more privacy and allowing them to identify themselves with the scale of the building. Likewise, prison architecture is not neutral, but a dynamic force that is always involved in imposing power on the detained, and constantly adapts to how power is redefined overtime. A society’s desires for and shared ideas of security, shelter, privacy, identity, reputation, and punishment manifest themselves in physical form, which, in the prison context, determines everything from the color of furniture in prison cells to whether the prisoners get tiled private bathrooms.
The North Korean prison archipelago was founded on Kim Il Sung’s desire to isolate and oppress his political opponents. Following purges of challengers to his authority between 1956–1958, Kim ordered the establishment of political prison camps because “factional elements have errors filled to the top of their heads, and must be isolated deep in the remote mountains.” He also ordered that “for the victory of the socialist revolution, anti-revolutionary elements… would have to be oppressed.” In 1958, Kim Il Sung announced Cabinet Decree 149, which established “special districts for the objects of dictatorship” and banished “politically unreliable” people from the DMZ, Sino-North Korean border, coastal regions and areas surrounding Pyongyang. Hence, the prison archipelago has grown in proportion to the North Korean leaders political need for oppression. Kim Il Sung’s 1969 speech on “The Need to Revolutionize the Staff” commenced the housing of political prisoners in Yodok concentration camp (Kwan-Li-So №15) in 1969. More than 100 thousand people were sent to eight camps by 1982, as a consequence of Kim Jong Il’s consolidation of power through the Three Revolutionary Team Movements in 1973 and 6th Party Congress in 1980, manufacturing demand for at least four more concentration camps. Predictably, the number of camps only grew following the fall of the Socialist bloc in East Europe. In short, North Korean leaders have created the prison archipelago, to cleanse the body politic of “reactionaries” and “factional elements,” who are seen as corrupting or compromising presences. This idea was made explicit in a 1972 statement, where Kim Il Sung declared the principle of “guilt by association:”the idea of punishing generations of the criminal’s family members along with the criminal, based on the claim that “their seed must be eliminated through three generations.” Hence, in a cross application of scholarly literature on refugees, the declared justification of the custody of political prisoners in North Korea can be said to “preserve and ‘protect’ the socio-biopolitical body.
Oppression Through Arrangement of Space
All North Korean prison camp space is segmented by walls, to segregate the prisoners from the prison officials. In ten North Korean prison camps, buildings reserved for prisoners’ sleep and work are isolated within a rectangular space enclosed by a layer of barbed wire and 3~4 meter concrete walls. The corners of the walls have elevated guard towers embedded in them, some as high as 7~8 meters, creating a powerful vertical power dynamic where prison guards gaze down on both the walls and prisoners. This reinforces, what Foucault calls, “the binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal)” that prison authorities evoke to exercise control. Prior to entering the prison camps, guards and security agents receive education to view inmates as subhuman and as enemies, and find themselves in an artificial spatial arrangement that seems to confirm the binary relationship. Like the walls of Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria, the walls of the North Korean prison archipelago also hide “the activities of the camp from the onlooker,” who may be the prison guard families, prisoner families or civilians.As the diagram of Kyo-Hwa-So №3 shows, prison officials’ family housings are positioned beyond the outer walls, entrenching the division between “lives worth living and protection, and lives deserving abandonment and exclusion.” Likewise, former inmate of Kwan-Li-So №15 Kang Chol Hwan recalled that “offsprings of criminals… weren’t even allowed to meet [guards’ kids],” and that segregation of space was “crucial to separate the wheat from the chaff.” Timelapse satellite imagery of Kyo-Hwa-So №1 shows that North Korean prison camps have evolved to become more segregated, marked by additional barbed wired walls to further segment prisoner and prison official spaces.
This segregated space is further segmented, so that prisoners are segregated by gender. In multi-story barracks, one floor would be solely occupied by women and another would be solely occupied by men. In village hut arrangements, as in the case of Kwan-Li-So №14, Kang noted that, with the exception of family huts, sexual contact between men and women were not allowed because the prison officials thought “this would result in another generation of counter-revolutionaries.” Despite this segregation, male prison guards seek out women prisoner space, single them out for acts of sexual violence, and even conduct forced abortions.
Buildings are also arranged so that prisoners “naturally” focus on work. At Kyo-Hwa-So №8, Kyo-Hwa-So №3, and Kwan-Li So №25, living quarters are positioned so that wherever workers look out from the building, they either see barbed wire strung walls or the workshop buildings. The entrance of the sleeping quarters is faced in the direction of the workshop buildings, instilling the message that prisoners must see and think of work from the moment they wake up. Workshop buildings are positioned in between the sleeping quarters and the prison entrance, blocking prisoners’ line of sight from extending beyond the workshops and functioning as physical hurdles that obstruct a direct line of sight from the sleeping quarters to the entrance gates. This also seems to be the reason why the double entrances are misaligned. As in the case of Kondal-gol №1 Detention Facility and other prison camps, the inner entrance connects to an intermediary space, which has an outer entrance that doesn’t align with the inner entrance. This arrangement confines the prisoner’s sight to the enclosed space.
North Korean prison camps also embody the principle of making the distance from prisoner settlements to be farthest away from the entrance. This principle is most drastically shown in the example of Kyo-Hwa-So №12 and Kwan-Li-So №14. In the case of Kyo-Hwa-So №12, the major prisoner settlements are located deep inside the mountains. Guard barracks and outposts are placed not only directly surrounding encaged settlements but also at strategic crossroads, where prisoners must pass 4 or more guard positions to reach the main entrance and train station. Kwan-Li-So №14 follows this same pattern. Additional guard postings are positioned at strategic locations, where prisoners are likely to pass, if they choose to defect through potential escape routes, through the mountains behind settlements.
The arrangement of space within the context of mountainous areas psychologically deters the prisoner from perceiving and thinking beyond the prison facilities. For example, the Yodok Concentration Camp (Kwan-li-so №15) is constructed in a valley enclosed by Mt. Paek (1,742 meters high) to the north, Mt. Tok (1,250 meters) to the west, Mt. Byoungpung (1,152 meters) to the south, Mt. Modo (1,833 meters) to the north-east, and Chaebong Pass (1,250 meters) to the east, where prisoners enter through. In his memoir Aquariums of Pyongyang, Kang writes of a 4 year veteran of the camp, Oh Jung-il, telling him that the steep slopes of the mountains, along with armed units, barbed wire and camouflaged traps positioned throughout the mountain top thwarted any thought of escape. Kim Yong, former inmate at Kwan-Li-So №14, felt the same when he observed the mountains, which he “soon learned that it would be even more difficult to escape that way.” Like the forests surrounding the Treblinka Concentration Camp in Poland, the forests and mountains binding the North Korean concentration camps also serve as “natural [barriers] to sight,” akin to the role concrete walls play, shielding the realities outside the camp from the prisoners themselves. As illustrated in camp sketches of former inmates Shin Dong Hyuk and Kim Hye-Sook, all details stop at the mountain ranges, as if they were green walls that demarcate the limitations of perception and knowledge.
Internal Structure of the Buildings
The essence of the North Korean prison cell is embodied in the interrogation room. Aside from the portraits of the dictators or a party slogan, desks and chairs are the only identifiable objects of the empty rooms, placed at their center, establishing a simple yet powerful relationship where the person sitting behind the desk has absolute power and the person kneeling in front of the desk is subject to their power. In the case of women, they are required to enter such interrogation centers fully naked in front of guards and other prisoners, and must “perform a series of squats so as to dislodge money hidden in their private parts.” Likewise, by simply being in the interrogation room, the prisoners’ biopolitical bodies are constantly subjected to power exercised via sovereign exceptions.
Other penal facilities within the camp are also designed to inflict physio-psychological torture. One common feature of punishment cells is that the length of the rooms is longer than the width of the rooms, elongating the perceived distance between prisoner and the cell doors, narrowing the prisoner’s range of sight and making the prison guard look larger. Conversely, in the eyes of prison guards this arrangement makes prisoners look relatively smaller, reinforcing the perceived power imbalance. The cell entrance is also deliberately designed so that prisoners have to crawl to get in. The rooms themselves are stripped from any other furniture or distinctable physical feature, except for metal bars affixed to the walls or ceiling, which prison guards use to perform torture. For example, the prison guards of Kwan-li-so No.14 tied former inmate Shin Dong-hyuk’s arms and legs to metal fixtures on the ceiling, dangling him above a fire to burn his back. Likewise, the prison room becomes a canvas for prison guards to perform ‘creative forms of torture’ on prisoners, whose bare lives are potentially exposed to any form of violence.
Intrusion is the guiding concept of detention spaces. In a case study of the Onsong Detention Facility, prison bars are positioned on two opposite sides of each prisoner’s room, allowing the prison guards to have full visibility over the prisoner’s body. The only division of space within the room is a protruding wall that creates a three sided space for a rudimentary toilet; however, the space isn’t completely isolated, meaning that prisoners must live with the stench of feces. Moreover, the walls of the inner cells and walls of the outer facility creates a hallway which aids the prison guards, by providing a clear line of sight to all the prison cells. Yet, for the prisoner, the hallway serves as an invasive medium which allows sounds to echo throughout the prison cells, meaning that every prisoner’s space is constantly intruded by shrieks of pain from other prisoners and abusive shouts of prison guards. Moreover, the echo effect creates psychological dread, as the visual sight of the prison guard is preceded by the crescendoing sound of the prison guard approaching the cell. Conversely, this spatial arrangement obstructs sunlight from reaching the prisoners, whose skins ooze with pus following long non-exposure to sunlight. Moreover, with the absence of internal heating systems and the geographical location of camp facilities within valley areas, this arrangement lowers temperatures within the cell, where even foreigner prisoners, like Ali Lamada, had their toenails fall off and their feet covered with sores due to frostbite. Ms. Seo Jin, who was interned at Kyo-yang-so №55, recalled she was perpetually pained by the “sitting-motionless-torture” and “overwhelmed by fear and bitter cold” of January.
The living quarters are either designed to completely isolate or completely deprive privacy. One prominent example is the “Harmonica House” arrangement, where the inner living space is just large enough for the prisoner to lie down. Aside from having a basic kitchen for making food, the layout is similar to the rooms at the detention facilities, giving the impression that even “private” living space can be a potential space of torture. A window is attached to each door, allowing outsiders to peer inside, with that awareness creating a perpetual sense of insecurity. Aside from the ever existing potential of an intrusive gaze, privacy is subtly deprived, as each room is flanked to at least one other. As the walls are made out of dirt and the roof is made out of straw, the building infrastructure is not only flimsy against natural forces, but also is sound-porous, incentivizing prisoners to self-censor themselves even in their living space.
An example of the latter is the “horseshoe shaped” dorms. This architectural idea is akin to the philosophy of ‘non-Aryan’ space at Auschwitz, where the standard design of army horse stables were presented as “the solution to the housing problem in the camp.” At the Kaechon district of Kwan-li-so №14, Kim Yong noted that the barracks contained six rooms, which each had fifty persons, sleeping on three tiers of wooden bunk beds. In his case, he and 60 other prisoners slept on a cement floor, without beddings, crammed in a 10 by 6 yard room, which was locked from outside by prison guards. Mr. Yoo Chun-shik reported such overcrowded sleeping quarters in Kyo-hwa-so №22, where sixty to seventy prisoners lived together and two people had to share one blanket. Likewise, prisoners are not interned in these spaces as individuals but as masses, defining these prisoners as subhuman vermin and treats them as so.
At its core, North Korean architecture creates spaces that are universally observed, like schools and offices, and twists their purposes for oppression and degradation. For example, Kang recalls that teachers at the political prison camp school wear revolvers, punish students by making them stand naked in the courtyard all day, or make students crawl in front of the class saying “I’m a dog.” In Kwan-li-so №14, Shin recalls that prison official office rooms at the garment factory, became synonymous to spaces of abuse, where young women provided sexual services to officials in exchange for lesser workloads. Shin himself witnessed a guard (bowijidowon) grope his mother, who was cleaning his office, and proceed to have sex with her. Conversely, the deprivation of spaces of privacy and bare minimum standards of human dignity also influences prisoners to exhibit behaviors, contrary to established ethics. As illustrated in former prison guard Ahn Myong Chol’s illustrations, some prisoners have sexual relations in open bathrooms. On the right, a mother and her child have sexual intercourse in their room, and a sister and brother have sexual relations next to their sleeping mother. Likewise, traditional Confucian values, which form the foundation of moral and ethical values within North Korea, seem to become suspended within these spaces.
Conclusion
Primo Levi observed that when the units of the First Ukraine Front liberated the Auschwitz camps, the soldiers “did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint,” by “a shame the Germans did not know.” Applying Foucoult’s analysis, the architecture of the North Korean prison archipelago complement the coercive practices of the prison guards to create an order, where the individual body is reduced to a “multi-segmentary machine” that responds to discipline, by complying to “being placed,” operating within regimented time, and submitting to commands. Despite overwhelming evidence, the North Korean regime has consistently denied the existence of political prison camps, and has rather attempted to conceal and camouflage them. Likewise, in a future scenario of a North Korean regime collapse, if North Korean leaders are to be convicted on grounds of the human rights atrocities committed in political prison camps, responses to potential objections and rebuttals must be made. Much more academic focus is needed on the architecture of North Korean camps, so that in courts of law, a strong case can be made to claim that the camps are deliberately designed to instill hopelessness, rob the prisoners of dignity, and foster an environment where crimes against humanity can flourish.
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