As of March 16th, an American college student has been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea. A 21-year-old, Otto Warmbier, was found guilty of “hostile acts” against the state for trying to steal a propaganda banner from the Yanggakdo International Hotel.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest has said, “It is increasingly clear that the North Korean government seeks to use these U.S. citizens as pawns to pursue a political agenda…We strongly urge the North Korean government to pardon him and grant him special amnesty, and immediately release him.”

Warmbier, from Ohio, took the stand and cried for forgiveness in front of a North Korean jury. In an hour long trial, he stated that it was “the worst mistake of his life;” however, he provided no exoneration for his crime. He told a gathering of reporters in Pyongyang that he tried to take the banner as a trophy for the mother of a friend who said she wanted to put it up in her church. He said he was offered a used car worth $10,000 if he could get a banner, and was also told that if he was detained and didn’t return, $200,000 would be paid to his mother. He is now facing life in North Korea’s brutal labor camps where residents go missing, are abused, and often become mentally broken.

Established in the late ’40s, North Korea’s forced labor camps were modeled after the Russian gulags. North Korea continues to deny the existence of these camps despite satellite images proving that they are real.

Some of the people currently detained in North Korean are:

-Canadian Christian pastor, Hyeon Soo Lim, who was sentenced to a life term of hard labor in December, for “crimes against the state.”

-Businessman, Kim Dong Chul, who was arrested in October 2015 for “espionage.”

-Sandra Suh, an American aid worker, who was arrested then expelled in April 2015, accused of gathering and producing anti-North propaganda.

In addition to hundreds of thousands of other people, both North Korean and not, it is likely that Warmbier and other foreigners will not be imprisoned in such conditions due to the risk of confirming their existence to the rest of the world.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has recently threatened “indiscriminate” nuclear attacks against the U.S. and South Korea and has said his country will soon test a nuclear warhead. Many analysts doubt the capability of these threats.