Much of the news attention on North Korea focuses on its nuclear and ballistic missile program, and the sanctions placed on the country in response to its increasingly threatening international behavior.

With every new test and exchanges of threatening rhetoric between Pyongyang and Washington DC, often underreported is the brutal reality of life in the DPRK.

Behind the image presented by state media and to journalists on official visits to the country lies a penal code with little tolerance for dissent and a rigid system of social organization that punishes even the mildest of infractions. At the heart of this