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World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country (No other country even makes the first page) (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by dessalines@lemmy.ml to c/dataisbeautiful@lemmy.ml

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From here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/2021.html

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[–] Objection@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So, looking for the wildest claims from the middle of the cold war and trying to pass them off as fact?

If you look at the estimates the article actually uses:

By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million.[13]

According to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953.[4] According to other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners.[22][23] Between the years 1934 to 1953, 20% to 40% of the Gulag population in each given year were released.[24][25]

Your number is several times higher than the highest estimate used outside of the historiography section (in case anyone reading is unfamiliar with the term, historiography is the study of how our understanding of history has changed over time, and so includes references to claims that have now been widely discredited).

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, you’re right. It looks like there’s a consensus now that the population in the Gulag was way lower than I thought. Fair play. There’s also a chart year by year, in the “history” section, which I missed.

If it was 2.4 million in 1953, out of total population of 179 million, that’s 1,340 in detention per 100k. The modern US is only 40% as bad as the literal Gulag at its peak. Fuckin hooray.