Camp Columbia (Hanford)

Camp Columbia on the Yakima River in Washington State. Information kiosk commemorating the prison camp is visible in center of picture.

Camp Columbia or Columbia Camp was a prison labor camp established on the north shore of the Yakima River opening on February 1, 1944, near Horn Rapids. The camp was operated between February 1944 and October 1947 by Federal Bureau of Prisons to provide labor supporting the Hanford Site. The camp was used to house "minimum-custody-type improvable male offenders," who had no more than one year to serve. These were violators of national defense, wartime and military laws. Included were conscientious objectors, violators of rationing and price support laws, those convicted of espionage, sabotage and sedition and those convicted by military courts martial. Aliens who failed to register were also in this category but none of them were sent here because the camp was located on the southern edge of the 670 square miles (1,740 km2) Hanford Site.[1][2]

  1. ^ http://www.hanfordnews.com/history/fifty/story/396.html
  2. ^ Brown, Kate (2013). Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 28–31. ISBN 978-0-19-985576-6.