A labor camp (or labour camp, see spelling differences) or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons (especially prison farms). Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, intended to abolish camps of forced labor. In the 20th century, a new category of labor camps developed for the imprisonment of millions of people who were not criminals per se, but political opponents (real or imagined) and various so-called undesirables under communist and fascist regimes.

Precursors

Early-modern states could exploit convicts by combining prison and useful work in manning their galleys. This became the sentence of many Christian captives in the Ottoman Empire and of Calvinists (Huguenots) in pre-Revolutionary France.

20th century

Albania

Allies of World War II

Bulgaria

Burma

China

Cuba

Czechoslovakia

Communist Hungary

Italian Libya

Germany

Imperial Japan

North Korea

Romania

Russia and the Soviet Union

Russian Federation

Sweden

Turkey

United States

Vietnam

Yugoslavia

21st century

China

North Korea

United States