Labor Camps – What That Really Means

Is Hard Labor Really that Bad?
Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2009
By Alex Altman

Before he becomes a forgotten footnote in Aung San Suu Kyi’s biography, it’s worth pausing to consider the price John Yettaw is about to pay for his unauthorized nighttime swim. On Aug. 11, Yettaw, 53, was sentenced to seven years in a Burmese prison for donning a pair of flippers and paddling across a lake to the Rangoon home of Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy dissident and Nobel laureate. (Suu Kyi received an additional 18 months of house arrest for violating the terms of her sentence by sheltering the Missouri native.) Seven years is a stiffer sentence than many had expected for Yettaw, who is said to suffer mental problems. Even worse: four of those years will consist of “hard labor” — a punishment whose severity shouldn’t go underrated.

Disciplining wrongdoers with arduous physical activity stretches as least as far back as the ancient Greeks — and it’s always really sucked. Homer’s Odyssey recalls the plight of Sisyphus, the Corinthian King consigned to nudging a boulder up a hill for all eternity; according to the gods’ twisted decree, when he neared the top of the hill, the rock would come tumbling down. Rehabilitation in 19th century England took a page from the Greeks’ prescription for soul-crushing drudgery: inmates would be forced to trek endlessly on treadmills, pass their days turning purposeless cranks for thousands of revolutions at a time, or shuttle cannonballs back and forth in an activity known as the “shot drill.” Among those subjected to forced labor in British prisons was scribe Oscar Wilde, who toiled for two years on charges of public indecency.

In the first half of the 20th century, both Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s Soviets used forced labor to build up their infrastructure. From 1918 to 1956, between 15 and 30 million people are estimated to have died toiling in the notorious Soviet gulag from exhaustion, illness and malnutrition brought on by 14-hour days felling trees, digging in the frigid Siberian tundra or mining coal. Often the labor was as fruitless as the punishments devised by the British. In the early 1930s, more than 100,000 prisoners toiled to construct a canal between the White and Baltic Seas — which turned out to be too narrow and shallow to service most vessels.

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