The system did not seek mere punishment but a full, voluntary confession and self-denunciation, treating the prisoner's active acceptance of his own guilt as the goal. Resistance was met not with simple force but with relentless pressure to make the prisoner articulate and believe in his own criminality.
Prisoners were organized into small mutual-surveillance groups where each member was pressured to monitor, criticize, and report on the others, making the group itself the instrument of control. The threat came not from distant guards but from fellow prisoners competing to prove their own reform by exposing deviation.
The account shows calorie rations deliberately calibrated to each prisoner's compliance and labor output, so that food itself became the primary lever of behavior rather than a mere condition of imprisonment. Viewing the camp through its ration tables reveals that starvation was a managed instrument, tightening during political campaigns and famine, not an accidental byproduct of scarcity.