The eye is drawn to news that is current, urgent, and viscerally powerful. These are stories where you can sense the immediacy of the news and where one of the great motivators – money, sex, violence, and celebrity – is right in front of you. But some stories fall by the wayside, ongoing stories without an immediate catalyst for a headline.

The story below is the first in a series of these overlooked stories.

Though most of its presence in the news cycle comes from empty threats of nuclear action against the United States, conditions in North Korea are darker than might be apparent. Torture and other human rights offenses take place on a regular basis in the country’s six concentration camps designed for political dissidents.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is an impoverished country, with the 197th largest GDP per capita in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook. The ostensibly-communist country is a hereditary dictatorship with a large military and relatively little industry. Only 16% of the country’s land is viable for farming, leading to near-constant fear of starvation outside of the larger cities such as the capital, Pyongyang.

At times, North Korea has experienced famine and mass-starvation. According to a 1999 congressional report, from 1995 to 1998,, between 900,000 and 2.4 million people died from a combination of poor resource allocation and a series of natural disasters.

The country is controlled by Kim Jong-un, the grandson of Kim Il-sung, the Eternal President and late ruler of the country. The Kim family is surrounded by a cult of personality to the degree that it is reported by the state media of North Korea that the birth of former Supreme Leader was heralded by a double rainbow and caused winter to turn into spring. Schools in North Korea are required to build an additional lecture hall for the study of Kim Jong-il, known as the Kim Jong-il Research Institute. In this country of extreme poverty, the Kim family has billions of dollars in Luxembourg banks for if they ever need to flee the country, according to Ken Kato, the director of Human Rights in Asia. Kato claimed in an interview with The Telegraph that “this is the most extensive money-laundering operation in the history of organized crime,” and that the money comes from a combination of weapons dealing, narcotics trafficking, insurance fraud, and slave labor.

Despite all of this cause for unrest, North Korea has remained well within the power of the Kim family. One possible explanation for this complacency is fear. North Korea operates six known prison camps for political dissidents, a broad term meaning anyone who the government considers a threat or a nuisance. The known prisons house roughly 200,000. Within these camps, conditions are both barbaric and routine – prisoners either obey orders in the factories and mines or they are tortured and killed. Stealing food is punished by public execution, and starvation is rampant.

The most well-known concentration camp is the Hoeryong Penal Colony Number 22, or Camp 22. Prisoners, who may have tried to flee the country, fallen out of favor with the ruling elite, or been caught with a forbidden radio, are killed through excessive labor or starvation as a matter of routine, and are often killed arbitrarily by guards. Ahn Myung-chul, a former guard at the camp, wrote in the Daily NK that guards sometimes beat prisoners to death in the reenactment of their favorite martial arts movies.

The prisons practice a discipline known as guilt by association – if you know or are related to somebody who committed an offense, you, too will be punished. Once, said Ahn Myung-chul, he found out that a prison had attempted to escape; as a response, he ordered thirty-one people killed from five families.

Camp 22 is almost at the country’s northernmost point, mere miles from the border with China. Though the North Korean government denies its existence, the electric-fenced in compound spans 225 square miles of farmland, mines, and factories where prisoners work from 5:00am to 8:00pm. After the 15-hour work day, they are sent to reeducation classes meant to essentially break any remaining desire to flee, according to the Database for North Korean Human Rights in its study, “Political Prison Camps in North Korea Today.”

Inside the labor zones, conditions are appalling. Shin Dong-hyuk, a fugitive from one of the prison camps, stated in a Washington Post interview that, after accidently dropping a sewing machine in one of the prison’s factories, “I thought my whole hand was going to be cut off at the wrist, so I felt thankful and grateful that only my finger was cut off.” In mines, prisoners are given shovels and told to dig for coal without safety equipment or proper time to rest.

Camp 22 is just one of six similar camps, where blame for familial crime is passed on for three generations. In this system, if a man was convicted for a crime and sent to a prison, his children would live in the prison, as would their children. Only his great grandchildren would go free. For some families who were imprisoned during the Korean War, this end of sentencing is just coming to term. With a reported 2000 people starving or otherwise dying in just Camp 22 alone each year, it’s likely that very few families made it through the process intact.

The Kim family has immense power in North Korea, and with that power comes paranoia. Prisoners are kept in these conditions in order to ossify the social order with the Kims on top. However, this consolidation of power and oppression of North Koreans could become the undoing for the Kim dictatorship. International recognition of the hellishness of the region could lead to tightening of economic sanctions or direct action. Perhaps all it takes is the spark of dialogue.