Recent satellite images show that North Korea's prison infrastructure is growing exponentially, but according to pyongyang, North Korea's capital city, these prisons do not exist.

Amnesty International commissioned the images from DigitalGlobe, a commercial satellite imagery vendor. In their release, Amnesty claims that up to 200,000 prisoners, including children, are being held "in horrific conditions in six sprawling political prison camps."

Amnesty also conducted research on two camps, kwanliso 15 (also known as Yodok) and kwanliso 25 to assess the status of these camps since the UN Commission of Inquiry’s 2014 report which found the gravity, scale, and nature of human rights violations in North Korea without parallel in the contemporary world.

The same report documented rape, infanticide, torture, deliberate starvation, forced labour, and executions against those who are in the ever-growing prison system in North Korea.

Many of these prisoner's greatest crimes were just watching a foreign television program. Some were caught practicing religious beliefs that Pyongyang deemed hostile, and some prisoners were detained for merely having undesirable family members, so if a family member tries to defect from North Korea, siblings, parents, and grandparents can be sentenced to work in these deplorable work camps for as long as the regime deems it necessary.

Aidan Foster-Carter, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at Leeds University in England, said: "It is difficult to get hard data (on North Korea) for obvious reasons, and it could be that the numbers of people in the camps are growing. What may be happening is that as part of the changing political situation the government has conducted a purge of people opposed to the succession (of leader Kim Jong ll by his son Kim Jong-un).

Kim Jong-un was also accused of ordering an executing of his older half-brother Kim Jong-nam by assassination in February at a Malaysian airport.

Kim Jong-un's willingness to eliminate his family, political subordinates and the people trapped in his country shows how powerful he is in the confines of North Korea and how much danger people face on a daily basis.

To help North Korean citizens who are trying to escape this terrible persecution, you can donate to http://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org.