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In Witness to Transformation, we argued that the North Korean regime had dramatically expanded the scope of economic crimes. These legal “reforms” permitted incarceration in labor training camps—usually for relatively short periods of time--for virtually any market-oriented activity. We speculated that one possible motive for the horrible conditions in the short-term labor camps was the desire to increase bribe prices; the more nasty incarceration is, the more detainees are willing to pay to avoid it.
A larger-scale drama is now playing out with respect to the penal system, but the objectives are political as well as economic. As early as November, DailyNK reported that prisoners were being screened for a special amnesty. Reductions of sentences and outright amnesties take place every year on the ‘Day of the Sun’, as Kim Il Sung’s birthday is known. But on the 100th anniversary of the Great Leader’s birth, nothing less than a grand amnesty would do. The subsequent announcement of the amnesty—scheduled to take effect on February 1—now has the added benefit of showing Kim Jong Un’s magnanimity as well. Yet another follow-up from the DailyNK suggested that the amnesty would include refugees repatriated from China, which is rare but not unheard of, as well as those who have been detained but not yet processed through the rubber-stamp judicial process.
The shell-game quality of the whole exercise hardly needs comment. The regime is hardly getting political mileage abroad; Western coverage—including in the Huffington Post—is quite rightly asking why these people were incarcerated in the first place. But it gets worse. First, the “screening process” of release was apparently accompanied by a “bribery rush” as families sought to have their cases “reviewed,” confirming our suspicion that there is a political economy of detention. The DailyNK stories suggest there may be other economic motives as well. Prisoner releases are a way to reduce the burden on the authorities of having to feed detainees. According to one report, a State Security Agency (Kuk'ka anjonbowibu or "bowibu" for short) holding facility in Hyesan currently holds over 100 people caught trying to defect. “Even the NSA agents at the facility are happy about [the amnesty] because they don’t have anything to feed the detainees anyway. They are hoping to quickly release those that will be released, turn other people over to other parts of the system and make them someone else’s problem..."
But the ultimate shell game is that regime is in a defensive mode at the moment and arrests appear to be going up not down, at least in the border areas (the LA Times provides just one of many reports of this sort). Of course, who knows? Perhaps Kim Jong Un will prove the great liberalizer. But if the hemorrhaging to the market continues, the regime might have to arrest people simply to provide labor to state-run factories, mines and farms. As we argued in Witness to Transformation, this risk is not satire but a central motive for the “lock ‘em up then release ‘em” strategy. Recent Korean reports have also noted the regime’s dilemma in this regard.
