1067
reminder rule (lemmy.cafe)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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edit: GUYS fuck stalin and fuck tankies, period. i understand that this community is more sensitive than most to pro-stalinist vibes, and i apologize for unintentionally twinging that nerve, but you need stop calling each other (and me) slurs

good heavens, happy new year, fuck incarceration and murder in all forms

(mods pls also do your job and help with the slurs thing)

edit2: big thank u 2 da mods for helping with the slurs thing u guys rock 😎 💕

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[–] 43 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

I did some googling out of curiosity, turns out Wikipedia has a whole ass article on it: The US prison rate as of 2021 is 531 per 100000 (peaked in 08 with 755 after a huge spike in the 80s and 90s, I wonder why). In the Soviet Union during the high of the gulag system, it was estimated (by actual historians, not the soviets) to be 714 to 892.

Apartheid South Africa was 851. Saudi Arabia has 200.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You're counting the percentage of population, in the meme it's the percentage of all incarcerated people.

    I don't want to search for stats, but it may be so that with a higher incarceration rate the USSR still held less of the total.

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago

    Then it's a pretty stupid metric. A small country could imprison and torture half its population and still be a tiny fraction of total people in prison.

    That being said, there's obviously way too many people in prison in the US right now.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago*

    I find back about that it peaked at 1.4% or 1.5% in 1950 in a few sources: 2.5m to 2.7m prisoners for about 180m citizens. So significantly higher than what you found.

    On Quora a Russian posted a nice graph, but I don't see a source for the data : https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Soviet-citizens-were-incarcerated-at-any-given-time-The-US-has-0-7-of-its-population-in-prison-and-I-was-wondering-how-that-compares-to-the-old-USSR

    Having read testimonies of the nazino island gulag and a few Russian prisoner novels, the Soviet prison system really shouldn't be compared to the USA one. Those percentages might not be far off ("only" 2x more at the worst), but numbers don't tell everything. Stalin's reign of terror was so much worse than the modern day USA dystopia. Compare the USA to modern day Canada or western Europe and it will highlight much better how bad it is doing.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What's your source for the gulag numbers? The wiki lists 18M though the system with a population of 180M, with something like 1.5M deaths. That would seem to indicate a number higher than 1%.

    The emergent consensus among scholars is that, of the 14 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag camps and the 4 million prisoners who passed through the Gulag colonies from 1930 to 1953, roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million prisoners perished there or they died soon after they were released. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

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