• NovaPrime@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Its been a few years since I checked, but as of 2015 at least the US, which is 5% of the world’s population, give or take a few, had over 25% of the world’s prison population. Total. Fucking. Insanity

  • yeather@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Quick reminder this site lists 0 mentions of how they gain data for other countries outside the United States, including bad faith reporters such as China, Iran, Russia, and possibly India and other countries. Though it should be noted China does not consider certain prisoners like Uyghur Muslims in reeducation camps as part of its justice system, Russia does not count conscripted prisoners in its system, and many others will attempt to hide or obscure true reports.

    • warm@kbin.earth
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      2 months ago

      Bringing out the whataboutism for a country that doesn’t even exist anymore?

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        2 months ago

        Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines’s habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US’s prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don’t even make the claim of being “democratic” and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.

        Also, I just looked, and I don’t think these numbers are accurate. I think they’re straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think its numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.

        US Incarceration Rate

        List of Countries by Incarceration Rate

        The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of freedom as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!

        • warm@kbin.earth
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          2 months ago

          Yeah I also looked on Wikipedia, which uses World Prison Brief data. The WPB is from 2023 and the Prison Policy data is from 2021, so maybe things changed, but I can’t find the WPB data for 2021 and nor do I want to spend anymore time looking :D

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        2 months ago

        The Gulag at the peak housed about 7,500 per 100k of the Soviet population.

        (And yes, the US’s 531 is still also an atrocity.)

        Where did you get 329? I actually couldn’t find any post-Kruschev numbers, but I know after privatization, Russia was pretty competitive with the US’s dystopian nightmare.

          • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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            2 months ago

            Ah, got it. I was talking about USSR, not modern Russia. Modern Russia is its own thing and its own brand of horror but not the same as OG Communist USSR which was more what I was trying to highlight.

            • mihnt@lemmy.ca
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              2 months ago

              I doubt anything that came out of the USSR will be entirely accurate anyways.

              • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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                2 months ago

                Yeah; that’s probably why there is such a lack of data. The period for which there are estimates vary by a factor of 20 between low and high estimates. 🙁

            • OBJECTION!@lemmy.ml
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              2 months ago

              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
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                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.

  • kindenough@kbin.earth
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    2 months ago

    It is always depressing to read people all of a sudden worried about other countries like China or Russia, don’t even giving a minuscule fuck about what is happening in their own country.

  • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    Half of Michigan wants to commit crimes against the other half, but they are fortunately separated by some really great lakes.

  • Coreidan@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I don’t get this graph. So all of US has a smaller incarceration rate than just Louisiana? What?

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      i have 4 boxes labeled A to D, and 10 rocks.

      i put 1 rock in A, 2 in B, 3 in C and 4 in D.

      A[⚪] B[⚪⚪] C[⚪⚪⚪] D[⚪⚪⚪⚪]

      i then paint 1 rock in B, 2 rocks in C and 1 rock in D.

      A[⚪] B[⚪🔴] C[⚪🔴🔴] D[⚪⚪⚪🔴]

      then i put the boxes in a bigger box called the united boxes.

      here’s the rate of painted rocks:

      1. C 66% (2/3)
      2. B 50% (1/2)
      3. United boxes 40% (4/10)
      4. D 25% (1/4)
      5. A 0% (0/1)
    • tonyn@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      The entire US would have the average of all the states’ incarceration rates.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Thats how averages work, unlike eg maximums.

      But Im sure reversing that chart would correlate with math test scores.