Re:The Caging of America
by yummyfajitas on Sunday March 11, 2012 @10:19PM
(#3692082)
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.
Re:The Caging of America
by yummyfajitas on Sunday March 11, 2012 @11:10PM
(#3692186)
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":
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)