Thread: Prison system in America tops Stalin's "gulag" in number of inmates - New Yorker

This article is astounding:

Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America : The New Yorker

Excerpt:

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

Excerpt:

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing.

Oh, no. US has surpassed Stalin long ago.
Throughout the period from 1921 till 1954 the bloody Stalin only managed to convict 3,777,380 people and execute 642,980 of them. At any moment of his reign the number of prisoners in the evil USSR never exceeded 1.7 million people.

Ramil, will the real "Evil Empire" please stand up...? lol

Here in Russia we sometimes refer to US as to the 'Empire of Good'.

I have heard of this. It's great sarcasm.

Wow, so scary! For me, the USSR was never scary or evil while it still existed. It was afterwards that all the "dirty laundry" was aired and everyone thought America was so lovely in comparison with the USSR. People were like "Oh, Americans were right all along - the USSR was terrible, fancy that!" People who had previously been the biggest USSR supporters and communists suddenly denied everything and went on holiday to Disneyland..... almost!

It's not until recently that Europeans are waking up and thinking -wait a second, how many wars are the Americans going to start, and why should the whole world circle around their bankrupt economy and oil dependency...

I am impressed that a famous magazine like New Yorker writes about this though.
Hopefully lots of people will read the article and stop to think..... !

Hanna, I think ALL of us were deluded by propaganda. Americans too! Many of us are waking up to that fact. I have been watching many Soviet-era movies in Russian (with English subs - helps me learn fast!) and I am astounded, really. I am seeing a lot more honesty from many of these films, than I saw in American films from the same time period.

I think that maybe the truth lies in the middle somewhere...