"The penal labor encampments are located in the mountains and mountain valleys in the remote interior of north and north central North Korea. They cover huge areas, miles long and wide. The outer perimeters are surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, except where the mountain ranges are considered impassible. The encampments have multiple thousands of prisoners who are housed in scattered areas or discrete villages for different categories of prisoners in the valleys or at the foot of the mountains. Single prisoners live in dormitories and eat in cafeterias. The families live in tiny shacks, sometimes multiple families to a single dwelling...

"Prisoners come into the camps in one of two ways. Suspected wrong-doers or wrong thinkers are picked up by officers of the State Security Agency...detained in small cells and subjected to intense and prolonged interrogation, almost always accompanied by beatings and severe torture, after which they are dispatched to one of the prison labor camps. Initially, at the camp they express relief at being able to supplement their meager rations by eating grass and other edible plants and being able to stand up and walk around...

"...The new prisoners coming straight from North Korean society describe their shock at what they see: walking skeletons, covered in dirt with matted hair (from the inability to bathe or wash regularly), dressed in tatters and rags, many with hunched backs from bent over farm labor, and many hobbling about on stick crutches having lost arms and legs to mining or logging accidents, or minus fingers or toes lost to frostbite. It will be only a matter of months before all the food stores the new prisoners have brought from home are consumed, and all the clothing and household goods have been bartered away for food, until all they have left from their previous civilian life are the clothes on their back and the shoes on their feet. And these would shortly be dirt-covered, tattered and torn.

"These prisoners put considerable mental anguish into trying to figure out what precisely caused their family this dreadful turn of fate..."