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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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Cool now do USSR
Bringing out the whataboutism for a country that doesn't even exist anymore?
Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines's habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US's prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don't even make the claim of being "democratic" and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.
Also, I just looked, and I don't think these numbers are accurate. I think they're straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.
US Incarceration Rate
List of Countries by Incarceration Rate
The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of hope as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!
Yeah I also looked on Wikipedia, which uses World Prison Brief data. The WPB is from 2023 and the Prison Policy data is from 2021, so maybe things changed, but I can't find the WPB data for 2021 and nor do I want to spend anymore time looking :D
329 per 100k
The Gulag at the peak housed about ~~7,500~~ (edit: 1,340) per 100k of the Soviet population.
(And yes, the US's 531 is still also an atrocity.)
Where did you get 329? I actually couldn't find any post-Kruschev numbers, but I know after privatization, Russia was pretty competitive with the US's dystopian nightmare.
Edit: I was way wrong about the size of the Gulag
No where did you get 7500??? Holy shit, that would be nearly 10 million people. (assuming somewhere around 160 million total pop)
Yeah. I'm taking the high side of the widely varying estimates of the Gulag population, which in the period of the 1940s range from 3.5 million to 17.6 million depending on who's doing the estimating.
So, looking for the wildest claims from the middle of the cold war and trying to pass them off as fact?
If you look at the estimates the article actually uses:
Your number is several times higher than the highest estimate used outside of the historiography section (in case anyone reading is unfamiliar with the term, historiography is the study of how our understanding of history has changed over time, and so includes references to claims that have now been widely discredited).
Yeah, you’re right. It looks like there’s a consensus now that the population in the Gulag was way lower than I thought. Fair play. There’s also a chart year by year, in the “history” section, which I missed.
If it was 2.4 million in 1953, out of total population of 179 million, that’s 1,340 in detention per 100k. The modern US is only 40% as bad as the literal Gulag at its peak. Fuckin hooray.
From OP's source.
Ah, got it. I was talking about USSR, not modern Russia. Modern Russia is its own thing and its own brand of horror but not the same as OG Communist USSR which was more what I was trying to highlight.
I doubt anything that came out of the USSR will be entirely accurate anyways.
Yeah; that’s probably why there is such a lack of data. The period for which there are estimates vary by a factor of 20 between low and high estimates. 🙁