There are now more prisoners in American prisons than in Stalin's Gulag Archipelago

Australia comes in at 168/100,000 up from 151ten years ago. We have a similar policy on drugs so why blame drugs for the disparity? :asian:
 
AND? If you don't want to go to jail don't break the law. Pretty simple really. Apparently the other 999,240 people per 100000 fingured it out and don't go prison
 
ballen0351 said:
AND? If you don't want to go to jail don't break the law. Pretty simple really. Apparently the other 999,240 people per 100000 fingured it out and don't go prison
Click to expand...

Fixing the law to be beneficial to society is an option.
 
Also according to the US Fed Bureau of Prisons
http://www.bop.gov/news/quick.jsp

Drug Offenses:90,346(47.2 %)
Weapons, Explosives, Arson:31,003(16.2 %)
Immigration:22,496(11.8 %)
Robbery:7,939(4.1 %)
Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses:7,707(4.0 %)
Extortion, Fraud, Bribery:11,038(5.8 %)
Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses:5,688(3.0 %)
Miscellaneous:1,588(0.8 %)
Sex Offenses:11,479(6.0 %)
Banking and Insurance, Counterfeit, Embezzlement:817(0.4 %)
Courts or Corrections:629(0.3 %)
Continuing Criminal Enterprise:494(0.3 %)
National Security:87(0.0 %
 
All Drug offenses are only 47.2 % thats all not just possession and its way below 80%
 
I have a bit of a problem here with the title
Something to consider when comparing Stalin’s Russia to the current US justice system; Stalin had specially made apartment complexes where he placed a lot of people so he could watch them rather closely as well as control their movement and there were a lot of people there that were never in his Gulag Archipelago. And a lot of those people disappeared in the night never to be seen again.

Stalin killed an estimated 20,000,000 people

> It is estimated that Stalin killed
> 1,000,000 by execution
> 12,000,000 in the camps
> 3,500,000 in collectives

as for the rest no one knows and there are those that estimate the 20,000,000 number as being way to low and that the number only reflects about 50% of how many he actually is responsible le for killing one way or another.

Also you need to take into account that the majority of prisoners in US prisons are not expecting to never leave prison alive, unlike a Stalin Era Gulag. Also many are in prison for crimes they actually committed, were tried for and found guilty of, again unlike a Stalin Era Gulag.

The reason for this post; As much as the numbers in US prisons are alarming I think it is rather unfair to compare it to Stalin era gulags because in my opinion it type of sensationalism makes light of what Stalin actual did and It some little way legitimizes it, since it is a US law that is putting people in prison not a perceived threat to a person’s power base which brings about random killings. It also has a tendency to bring out public outrage and causes an overreaction in the response to what is going on in the US which is never been a way to fix anything,… but it sure as heck is a great way to gain readers ;)
 
Xue Sheng said:
I have a bit of a problem here with the title
Something to consider when comparing Stalin’s Russia to the current US justice system; Stalin had specially made apartment complexes where he placed a lot of people so he could watch them rather closely as well as control their movement and there were a lot of people there that were never in his Gulag Archipelago. And a lot of those people disappeared in the night never to be seen again.

Stalin killed an estimated 20,000,000 people

> It is estimated that Stalin killed
> 1,000,000 by execution
> 12,000,000 in the camps
> 3,500,000 in collectives

as for the rest no one knows and there are those that estimate the 20,000,000 number as being way to low and that the number only reflects about 50% of how many he actually is responsible le for killing one way or another.

Also you need to take into account that the majority of prisoners in US prisons are not expecting to never leave prison alive, unlike a Stalin Era Gulag. Also many are in prison for crimes they actually committed, were tried for and found guilty of, again unlike a Stalin Era Gulag.

The reason for this post; As much as the numbers in US prisons are alarming I think it is rather unfair to compare it to Stalin era gulags because in my opinion it type of sensationalism makes light of what Stalin actual did and It some little way legitimizes it, since it is a US law that is putting people in prison not a perceived threat to a person’s power base which brings about random killings. It also has a tendency to bring out public outrage and causes an overreaction in the response to what is going on in the US which is never been a way to fix anything,… but it sure as heck is a great way to gain readers ;)
Click to expand...

Agreed. The title is hyperbolic, but it was just too good not to post.
 
The comparison is nonsensical, but what we're spending to stop people from toking up is also pretty senseless.
 
Here is an excerpt from the original column that appeared in TIME magazine. The rest is available behind the paywall.

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/22/zakaria-incarceration-nation/

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America - more than 6 million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”
Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and *Britain - with a rate among the *highest - has 153....
This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.
That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America’s federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession....
Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990s to a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory sentences for time in state or federal prison. And as always in American politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states, they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from treasuries to outlying counties.Partly as a result, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education in the past 20 years. In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons vs. $5.7 billion on the UC system and state colleges. Since 1980, California has built one college campus and 21 prisons. A college student costs the state $8,667 per year; a prisoner costs it $45,006 a year.The results are gruesome at every *level. We are creating a vast prisoner under*class in this country at huge expense, increasingly unable to function in normal society, all in the name of a war we have already lost....​
Click to expand...

While the comparison with Stalin's Gulags is silly, as anyone who has read the Gulag Archipelago would know, the fact that the US has more people in prison than Stalin did at the height of the Archipelago's operation (according to the article). Further, I think we really need to identify the political forces that benefit from the creation of a narco-prison industrial complex. When corporations that own private prisons and law enforcement agencies can combine lobbying for stiffer drug penalties in order to give themselves more contracts and create jobs, our society has a problem. Essentially, the government has turned prisons and police officers into parasites feeding at the taxpayer trough at the expense of minorities, the weak, and powerless. Of course these results are exactly the same as most corrupt government programs. Whenever "war" is declared on anything men are pushed aside by pigs.

As Ozzy explained so long ago now.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Big Don said:
Sounds like actually using capital punishment would save quite a bit...
Click to expand...

Considering that there are so many people in prison now, that would make Stalin proud...
 
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