Yeah, but you are still unemployable for at least 10 years if you are in a state with a system to expunge felonies. There is another prison outside of the actual institutions waiting for every released inmate.

US prisons/jails: 2,266,800 adults in 2010

Stalin gulags: 1,727,970 people in 1953

(I am no expert on the Gulag system. Whatever the case is, it's uncontroversial that the US is the world's leading jailer of its own populace.)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Brief_history)

1.7m in Gulag / 108m in Russia = 1.6% incarceration rate

Pop # taken from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia

2.3m in prison / 312m in USA = 0.74% incarceration rate in the US

The Soviet Union had a population of 189 million people in 1953 according to Wolfram Alpha.

For an incarceration rate of 0.9%.

This also assumes the Soviet Union sent everyone to the Gulag, and had no local jails, etc. I don't know if this is actually true, can anyone comment?

I believe that during the height of the Gulag, local jails were mainly used as interrogation and storage facilities for people who would eventually end up in the camps. Certainly the camps held both those convicted of political and criminal offences.

I can recommend both Anne Applebaum's excellent "Gulag - A History" and, of course, Solzhenitsyn's incredible "Gulag Archipelago":

http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

probation and parole are better than being locked up but having 4 million people deprived of most of their rights, unable to get most jobs. and at the mercy of the benevolence of an overworked an under-trained PO is not exactly a good news for a country which thinks of itself as a beacon of freedom.

Then those people must not read the text closely. The author pointed out quite clearly that correctional supervision did not mean incarceration. Horrible readers.

The entire article is rendered horrible for overlooking one gruesome statistic among many?

The caption at the top of the article compares this 6M figure to the number in Stalin's gulag system - that's shocking. You didn't get to go home on probation after being sentenced to the gulag.

It doesn't render the article useless, but it does mean that it no longer commands authority.

Stalin would probably say something similar about the Nazi camps. You weren't given a meal a day and a shirt on your back while you lived your days in Siberia under the German system. Plus, most of the people in the Gulags had subversive political ideas that got them there rather than simply their grandparent's last name.

Your parent is objecting to what would appear to be intentional manipulation & misrepresentation of numbers, not accidental overlooking.

Most people reading the article will assume the 6M people are in a prison. Odds are this misconception is intended by the author.

Be careful with "most people" comments. I read the article and did not at any point assume the figure meant # of persons in a prison.

Correctional supervision stood out as not meaning incarceration.

Apologies, I misinterpreted - so the 4M are a subset of the 6M supposedly in prison. This is a fair criticism.