Penal colonies in Antarctica?

As the thread title states, are penal colonies or other sorts of prisons possible/feasible in Antarctica?

The biggest issue I can think of is what countries would do this? Pinochet-era Chile/Argentine junta seems the most likely to do this, but I could also see a dictatorial France doing this too, although there's the issue that France already has Devil's Island, plus a number of places almost as bad/worse and more remote than Antarctica to dump people to. A Nazi Antarctic base is full of horrifyingly evil potentials too, and could operate during the 1933-1939 period before the Royal Navy or others would shut the place down. The Soviets could do it too, but I figure they got enough use out of the gulags to need to build and supply a gulag on the other side of the world.

So are any of these particularly plausible? Could Pinochet or Videla's crew ever find a need to build a prison in Antarctica? Would the lack of an Antarctic Treaty make them (or an ATL equivalent dictator) even more interested in a potential prison there? I'd assume it would be a punishment for both prisoners and guards, making it even more usef
 

Archibald

Banned
Well, Staline Gulag was mostly in the arctic, so any nut dictator can certainly imagine a similar death camp in Antarctica
 
Still have to import 99 percent of the food, clothing and building materials to Antarctica.
Didn't Chile have a few uninhabited islands down near Tierra del Fuego?
Didn't Tierra del Fuego have a climate almost as miserable as Anarctica?
What about rumours of prisons high in the Andes, where prisoners slowly died of hypoxia?
 
Still have to import 99 percent of the food, clothing and building materials to Antarctica.
Didn't Chile have a few uninhabited islands down near Tierra del Fuego?
Didn't Tierra del Fuego have a climate almost as miserable as Anarctica?
What about rumours of prisons high in the Andes, where prisoners slowly died of hypoxia?
Still that region has trees and enough mammals to support an apex predator called puma, a very large cat. What does Antarctica have? Not a dam thing like that. It has only been possible for humans to live year round since the 1960's. The materials and science did not exist to do so until man was able to go land on the moon.
 
Remoteness is nice for secret prisons, but honestly, Antarctica seems too remote to be worth it, even if it weren't so inhospitable.
 

ben0628

Banned
Set up a couple of mining colonies manned by prisoners on the Antarctic Peninsula (don't want want kind of ores there are, but i'm sure there is some to mine). Penguins and Seals could be hunted for food and other reasons.
 
Set up a couple of mining colonies manned by prisoners on the Antarctic Peninsula (don't want want kind of ores there are, but i'm sure there is some to mine). Penguins and Seals could be hunted for food and other reasons.

It would be a huge money sink. Put your free labor somewhere they can least make a few inefficient pennies for you.
 
It would be a huge money sink. Put your free labor somewhere they can least make a few inefficient pennies for you.

Prisons are pretty expensive in general, though. An Antarctic penal colony gives free labour, can be used for scientific purposes (for any potential non-prison mining), and also can serve as punishment for the guards themselves. Plus it's one of the most hellish places out there, making for effective punishment and torture.
 
I think the UN buying the Falklands/ Malvinas from both Argentina and the UK they could make an effectie location for folk convicted in international courts
 
The Gulag system exploited geographic isolation but was supported by economic usefulness, which was key to the whole enterprise. If you want to build a canal through inhospitable (but infrastructurally useful) territory, then a Gulag makes sense, but only as long as the economics of the project work. The total cost of building, maintaining and supplying a camp would have to be less than the expected economic benefit of having one (at least in theory -we all know how differently such plans can work out in practice).

In the case of Antarctica, the isolation is certainly there -I'd imagine few, if any, escapes being made. The question is, would it be confer a sufficient economic benefit to be worth the effort? Antarctica has reasonably large mineral deposits and possibly even oil and gas, so there are items to pursue. Unfortunately (or fortunately!) the costs of doing so would appear to outweigh the expected benefits, even if you didn't have to worry about paying your workers.

Stalin's Gulag system had an advantage in that it was, for the most part, contained on the same landmass and within the same polity as the state that ran them. The camps could therefore be supplied by canal and rail, enabling the transport of sufficient supplies and resources. This is not the case with Antarctica, which is even more remote, less politically amenable and far more costly to exploit.

Were there to be significant technological advances that dropped the cost of supply, extraction and life support, then it might just about work. It's a big 'if' though and it also leads to the question of whether such advances would still use fossil fuels for energy -if not, then you've just lost one of the cases for being in Antarctica in the first place.
 
Im assuming you don't want the prisoners to eat penguins?

Isn't penguin meat pretty notorious for tasting horrible? The weather should do the punishment, not the food!

So basically rura-penthe then!

Basically it would not be a prison, it would be a death camp.

Anyone who would build a penal colony in Antarctica is probably intending for that to be the point to some degree or another.

I think the UN buying the Falklands/ Malvinas from both Argentina and the UK they could make an effectie location for folk convicted in international courts

Ideally. But those islands are too nice compared to some other nearby islands, like the ones off the coast of Tierra del Fuego. Or for that matter, Antarctica.

Were there to be significant technological advances that dropped the cost of supply, extraction and life support, then it might just about work. It's a big 'if' though and it also leads to the question of whether such advances would still use fossil fuels for energy -if not, then you've just lost one of the cases for being in Antarctica in the first place.

For a future prison camp, you always have the possibility of rare-earth metals. Antarctica beats going to the Moon for them like some people have proposed. And there's almost guaranteed large reserves of gold and silver to be found.
 
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