The Sichuan Deyang Prison Makes Illegal Profits from Abusing Prisoners

In both the male and female prisons in China, prisoners are often used as cheap labour to manufacture commodities. These commodities are then packaged in Guangdong and sold to Japan, the United States, and the Southeastern Asian countries. Most of the work done by prisoners involves making clothes, polishing jewellery, making hair products, or smoothing paper edges. The Jewellery Association Factory, located in Guangxi Province of Wuzhou City and also in Fujian Province, owns 100,000 jewellery machines which have all been set up in prisons, including the Deyang Prison. Some Chinese-owned enterprises in Thailand have also purchased many machines and have set them up in several prisons in Sichuan to have the jewellery processed. The Hong Kong Lepachu Industrial Co. Ltd. uses prisoners to make hair products, and the Guangdong Liren Clothes uses prisoners to make their clothes which are sold to the United States and other southeastern Asian countries.

The only supermarket chain permitted by the Judiciary Department, the Hongqi Supermarket, does not pay prisoners their salaries according to the prison laws. To make it worse, the Hongqi Supermarket also takes money from prisoners by placing a lot of orders in the prisons and not paying them extra. The Deyang Prison produced 150 thousand products for the Deyang Second Heavy Machinery Factory in 2003. These products were sold to Germany. The entire prison system in China is one enormous production line and a huge moneymaking machine.

The Jiang Zemin regime is using a 25% of China's GNP to persecute Falun Gong. A large number of Falun Gong practitioners are being detained in prisons, labour camps, and detention centres where they are forced to perform slave labour. The prisons use the slave labour from these Falun Gong practitioners and other tens of millions of prisoners to reap huge profits. They then take this money to intensify and sustain the suppression of Falun Gong.

In Deyang Prison, the police's bonus is closely related to the prisoners' labour. The police demand that every prisoner accomplish an amount of production worth 400 yuan each month. The money the prison earns is non-taxable, which is permitted by a higher-level judiciary department. What do the prisoners get out of this? Each prisoner gets 90 yuan for food each month plus a 5 yuan "reward" (this money comes from the financial department). Most of the prisoners have financial difficulties and this amount of money can not even help them with buying their toilet paper each month, let alone proper food items. It is also very difficult for a prisoner to make a 400-yuan production amount each month because the products they make are usually very cheap. Only high intensity and overtime labour can accomplish this task. Prisoners often work more than ten hours a day and have no weekends off.

The treatment for Falun Gong practitioners is worse because they are being persecuted while also having to perform the long-hours of slave labour. Practitioners who refuse to cooperate with the persecution are locked up in a dark cell or deprived of sleep. In the second prison block of the intensified-management team, more than 50 practitioners receive all kinds of physical punishment from the police. The police use them as an example to warn other prisoners that if they don't accomplish their tasks, they will be treated like the Falun Gong practitioners.

If there is a high-level judiciary department official who comes to the prison for an inspection, the police will find some prisoners who will praise the prison in front of the inspectors and tell the inspectors how the prison respects the prisoners' human rights. These prisoners are usually wealthy criminals, gangster heads, or relatives of some police officers. They do not have to perform labour and have special privileges (like they can beat up other prisoners without consequences). Some prisoners are angered over this and say, "There is even corruption in the prisons!"

Using this method, products made in the prisons in China are transported to cities along the coast and quietly sold all over the world after they have been packaged. These products from the prisons have a great advantage in competing against similar products in the market. The prisons use the prisoners' blood and sweat to make huge amounts of foreign exchanges and this money is then used for the brutal persecution against Falun Gong. A prisoner said, "The Deyang Prison treats us like livestock. We dare not imagine having any human rights; that would be too far away from us. No one will pity us because we are criminals. However, you Falun Gong practitioners should not be persecuted; you should be respected by society."

We ask people with a sense of justice from all over the world to pay attention to the human rights conditions in the prisons in China and take action to stop these labour and human rights violations. Do not indulge in bad deeds in return for money and profit.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/2/18/67793.html