ABSTRACT
Where the crime is invented by the security forces or where activities which are encouraged by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are defined by agents of a government as crimes. People who are not criminals by any stretch of the imagination may find themselves deprived even of the tenuous protection which has sometimes been afforded to those born into slavery. The penal slave works unseen, usually coerced by a petty official of the invisible apparatus of the totalitarian state. Others, including wholesalers and retailers in Western democracies, profit from the sale of his products. His anonymous master is the ultimate criminal of the case, but there are many others who must take their share of the guilt. Communist autocratic attitudes to work in general, and to political and penal slavery in particular, owe much to Russia's imperial past. For the criminal and political alike, there are four main penal regimes: general or ordinary, hard, strict, and special.
