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World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country (No other country even makes the first page) (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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From here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/2021.html

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

No where did you get 7500??? Holy shit, that would be nearly 10 million people. (assuming somewhere around 160 million total pop)

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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:

By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million.[13]

According to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953.[4] According to other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners.[22][23] Between the years 1934 to 1953, 20% to 40% of the Gulag population in each given year were released.[24][25]

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).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

From OP's source.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I doubt anything that came out of the USSR will be entirely accurate anyways.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

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. 🙁