Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

The reform bill is a pebble in the ocean.

The United States criminal justice system is a failure and has resulted in this country having 1/4 of the worlds total prisoners. There needs to be a massive concerted effort to fundamentally change it. A black man in America has more than double the chance of being in prison than someone during Stalins gulag. That is not justice.

There has been a talking point going around for a few years that the US imprisons more people now than Stalin's gulags did at their height. This is basically untrue.

HOWEVER

While accounting that Stalin's USSR had more or less half the population of the contemporary United States (WW2 = more or less), it is true that America's incarceration rate and absolute numbers are quite comparable to the Stalinist system, which is certainly scary.

From the link above:

The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens.

It is no hyperbole to say that the US prison industrial complex is unacceptable, especially for a country that purports itself the world’s preeminent democracy. But it is hyperbole because placing the US next to Stalinism (and Nazism for that matter) is inherently hyperbolic. The rhetorical move is supposed to provoke an emotional reaction not stimulate critical awareness. And as much as American liberals would like to think that the numbers of bodies ensnared in the US prison industrial complex is as bad, if not worse, than Stalinist Russia, the situation is far more complicated.

Here I don’t mean the quality of the Stalinist system No one is claiming that the US system is worse than Stalin’s forced labor camps. I only mean the quantity of humans in both systems.

The Stalinist penal system was a complex network of punishments and detentions: prisons, noncustodial forced labor, corrective labor camps, forced labor detention (katorga) special settlements, and corrective labor colonies. I won’t go into the meanings and various differences between these. Though experts make clear distinctions between these various units, to the popular mind, they all fall under the general name of gulag. The numbers of people, which also included children, in this penal machine at any given period remains partial. Up 20 percent of the gulag population was released every year, new inmates went in, corpses went out, some even managed to escape. But exactly how many people under Stalin’s correctional supervision is unknown.

Check the graphs in the link, as I won't reproduce them.

If the US has up to 2.5 million people incarcerated at some point in time, that is less - though only slightly less! - than the number of people in Stalin's gulag system in 1938-40, and a little more than 1935-7. If 6 million Americans are held under "correctional supervision", then the analogous number is not really know for prewar USSR, which may well be higher.

According to the straight numbers, the Stalinist system did not exceed the US’ six million during the years of the Great Terror. In 1938, there were 2.7 million people in the “gulag.” But this doesn’t include everyone under Stalinist “correctional supervision.” Therefore it doesn’t take account of prisons and released gulag prisoners who were forced to carry “Form A” which detailed their past crime, prison term, the deprivation of civil rights up to five years, and restricted where they could settle. There were roughly 2 million people released from the gulag between 1934 and 1940 which etches the Stalinist number closer to the United States.

Of course the Stalinist system reached its peak shortly before his death, upon which it was rapidly dismantled, and here the gulags were clearly absorbing more in absolute numbers than the American penal/carceral system ever has.

This means an estimated 7.4 million people were under Stalinist correctional supervision 1953, exceeding Zakaria’s and Gopnik’s 6 million for the United States. Again the numbers are probably higher since these numbers don’t include everyone in the Stalinist penal system.

Things get even more complicated when you consider the gulag population per 100,000 citizens. According to Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, the Soviet institutionalized population in 1953 was 2,621,000 or 1,558 per 100.000. When you include special settlements, the numbers jump to 4,301,000 or 2,605 per 100,000. This puts the 760 per 100,000 in the United States into perspective.

So the takeaway should be that, while the US has never really exceeded Stalinism's excesses (EDIT: Leaving aside the early years), it does come frighteningly close, at least in raw numbers. Which is bad. Real bad.

A more interesting comparison might be to Maoist China (which had about double the population of the contemporary US, as opposed to 50-60% like the USSR) and to contemporary China, which imprisons relatively few people but seems to have quite a lot in reeducation camps and the like, such as the notorious figure of up to 1 million Uighurs alone.