this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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There's currently less than 1.4 million prisoners in the US, while official Soviet records show 0.79 million in executions alone under Stalin. Average that by year, and you still have 0.02 million per year.
According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, which averages to 0.58 million per year.
Edit: That's a little bit more than two times the current US prison influx amount, and I didn't account for per capita-ing (modern US has more population in total than USSR ever did).
actual sources seem to disagree with you
https://web.archive.org/web/20121104001152/https://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777,00.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/the-caging-of-america
I only counted those incarcerated. You're counting community service, probation, parole, etc. And my sources are The Guardian and this academic journal.
That's just splitting hairs, but even going with your numbers, it's clearly comparable to the time of peak incarcerations in USSR. So, if we look at how the systems evolve over time, USSR incarceration rate dropped, while US incarceration rate continues to climb.
USSR having double of course isn’t comparable, and the US prison rate has been going down (well, at least until 2019, after which we got COVID and prison rates saw a gigantic dip that has been climbing bit by bit since, but still lower than 2019).
And no, it’s not just splitting hairs. There’s a difference between being constantly surveiled and watched by the state, temporarily (at least nominally); and getting locked up in a festering environment where they neglect your good feeding and, in the USSR’s case, your well-being and being forced to labor, with a much stronger KGB.
The only way you get double is by massively undercounting the actual rate of incarceration in US.
It's amazing how you managed to write this without a hint of irony as if Snowden leaks haven't happened. The level of surveillance that's currently happening in US is far beyond anything KGB could've ever dreamed of.
If you think I'm undercounting, show me a rate of incarceration per the same amount of heads for both the United States and Soviet Union. According to https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-009-9430-2, page 465, "At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the institutionalized population was over 2.5 million, or 1,558 prisoners per 100,000 population (Table 1). This incarceration rate was ten times that of the United States for the same year." I can email you a PDF of this paper if you want. Even in modern times, the population has been decreasing since 2013 until 2022, and according to Vox, the highest per 100,00 adults never passed 700.
It's "amazing" how all you focus on is the intelligence part while completely ditching the difference between probation and incarceration. Of course there's a difference between being held in a cell and having what's basically a search warrant on you for every step of your life by court order. And on intelligence, even if you completely disregard the judicial vulnerability, the US surveillance agencies still hold far less domestic power than the KGB's domestic cell.
Again, we're comparing to the incarceration rate today.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html
https://nicic.gov/resources/nic-library/all-library-items/growth-incarceration-united-states-exploring-causes-and
I refuse to believe that anybody could be stupid enough to genuinely think this.
Where is the incarceration rate? People getting held pre-trial is a problem, yes, but even then, the gulag held 2.5 million at their height in the 1950s, and that's not even counting anyone pre-trial or adjusting for the population difference between 1950s Soviet Union and modern day USA.
I am comparing to the incarceration rate today. In 2022, the incarceration rate was 700 per 100,000. Unless you have evidence that that rate more than doubled in two years, I don't see how the US has a higher incarceration rate.
Call me stupid all you want, do you still think incarceration vs. correctional supervision is splitting hairs?
These numbers have been challenged by many scholars, Parenti does a great job dissecting these claims in Blackshirts and Reds. You basically cherry pick the numbers you want for USSR while downplaying the numbers in US to make your argument.
I think that you're intentionally playing with the numbers to make your argument work.
Fine, we are both picking figures. If you think the numbers I gave are wrong, give me sourced numbers about the same thing that are right.
Chapter 5 here, references at the end of the book, can also read chapter 6 showing how incarceration rate jumped up dramatically after transition to capitalism https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf
I don't think labor camps and prison are comparable to probation and parole. Do you still want to include probation and parole? If not, I think we can safely conclude that the Soviet Union was much more authoritarian. (If you adjust it by capita, you'd have a US prison population of 1.03 million Soviet heads, which is only a few ten thousands more than half the Soviet population.) If yes, why?
As I've already stated repeatedly, I see exclusion of parole completely arbitrary. You could argue that it's not equivalent certainly, but you can't just dismiss it. And again, we're comparing peak incarceration rate in USS right after the revolution with incarceration in US when its functioning regularly. The fact that USSR numbers drop significantly over time while US numbers do not, is what's really key here.
All you've said about it before was that you thought it was "splitting hairs" once. What do you suppose we do with probation then? Is there a Soviet purge-era equivalent with a measure we can compare?
Well, that's what we sought to compare. Both you and EgoCom claimed stuff like "US incarceration rate is higher than what USSR had during Stalin's purges".
It's hard to have numbers drop a frick ton when you've had no arbitrary purging of ideas that led to gulag-levels of arrests.
We're just going in circles here, and it's pretty clear that we're not going to convince each other of anything. So, I'm going to leave it at that. Have a good day.