Labor camp
A labor camp 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. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization, 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 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 in pre-Revolutionary France.