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She says fellow inmates beat her in exchange for reduced sentences — a practice human rights investigators say is common in these camps.

"Everyone went to sleep at night, not me," Shen recalls. "They gave me a small stool, forcing me to stand on it. Once you fell to the ground, people would come to beat you. They asked drug addicts and prostitutes to beat you up."

Those beatings proved effective. After seven months, Shen gave in. She signed the compensation agreement and was released, but she continues to protest what happened to her.

"I want to call on the leaders to abolish re-education through labor camps," she says. "Inmates can no longer be tortured like this."

'Like Profit-Making Enterprises'

In January, the Chinese government announced it would "reform" the nation's notorious re-education through labor camps. Under the current system, police can send people to the camps for years without trial, sometimes just for complaining about local officials.

"The system has drawn increasingly wide and fierce criticism from the public for years, and the need for reform is more necessary at present," read a commentary in China's state-run Xinhua news service last fall.

The government has yet to explain what reform would mean. However, the people who know the camps best — former inmates — say closing them is long overdue.

China's Ministry of Justice says 160,000 people were imprisoned in 350 re-education through labor camps at the end of 2008.

Inmates include prostitutes, drug users and people like Shen, who have petitioned the central government to try to redress the wrongs of local officials.

Local authorities often use labor camps to shut up their critics with minimal paperwork.

"Local officials don't want their dirty laundry to be aired in the open," says Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch. "The police control the process. They don't have to go through the courts, and they don't have to present any evidence."

All they have to do is issue a document stating that an individual has disturbed social order, and that person can be sent to a camp for up to four years, Wang says. She adds, though, that actual sentences are shorter than they used to be and are now never more than two years.

The Communist Party built the labor camps in the 1950s to punish political enemies, including landlords and other capitalists. Today, the camps are driven by the same motives they were initially designed to punish.

"These re-education through labor facilities have become more like profit-making enterprises," Wang says, "for the local government to basically have free labor that they could force to work for many hours a day to produce products at very low cost for domestic and international consumption."

Desperate To Talk

Some former prisoners gathered recently at a dingy apartment buried among the alleys of south Beijing. They were so desperate to tell their stories that when a reporter arrived, they broke into applause.

The ex-inmates say they worked up to 16 hours a day making everything from circuit boards and uniforms to wire and blue jeans for little or no pay.

One of them, Tang Shuxiu, says she went to Beijing in 2011 to complain that her local government work unit hadn't given her an apartment to which she thought she was entitled.

Police picked her up before she got out of the train station.

"They asked, 'Are you here to petition?' I said, 'Yes,' " recalls Tang, who brought a mock-up of her labor camp identification card to pose with for photos so she can publicize the abuses of labor camps and push for change.

Tang, 51, says it never occurred to her to lie to the cops at the train station.

"I think petitioning doesn't mean I am doing something bad or committing a crime," she says. "I should tell the truth."