Private Prisons Set up in China to Persecute Falun Gong Practitioners (Photo)

While former Chinese president Jiang Zemin was still in office, he abused his power and huge proportion of China's national resources to build private prisons to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. These prisons were usually set up secretly. Now, almost every county and city in the nation has such prisons. The "610 Office" [an agency specifically created to persecute Falun Gong, with absolute power over each level of administration in the Party and over all other political and judiciary systems] is directly in charge of these prisons, whereas judicial and legal departments often administer regular prisons. Such private prisons are often mislabeled as "Legal System Education Classes" to deceive the public. Many practitioners have been sent to these types of prisons to be persecuted and they will not be released if they refuse to give up their belief in Falun Gong. Some practitioners have even lost their lives in these prisons.

The photo above shows the gate of a private prison located on the east side of the Veneer Factory - Raw Wood Material Processing Plant in Yakeshi City, Inner Mongolia. There are two boards hung on the gate (one board in Chinese characters and another in Mongolian) reading, "The Daxinganling District Legal System Education Base in Inner Mongolia." The Raw Wood Material Processing Plant used to be the largest plant of its kind in Asia and has a history of several dozen years. It went broke, however, in the 1990s and many workers were laid off.

What's surprising is that in the autumn of 2003, the "610 Office" spent a large amount of money renovating the plant and turning it into a private prison. A two-meter high wall was set up around the plant with a gate that was tightly closed. One can often hear dogs barking inside. The landscaping outside makes it hard for people to imagine it is in fact a place where innocent people are tortured and killed.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/7/30/80641.html