This is simply not true! Could you please provide a quote from where you got this in the article, because there seems to be no mention of it.

My grandparents were lucky enough to survive the Stalinist regime but many of our family didn't. There's no reliable numbers of how many where imprisoned by Stalin and, even worse, how many died in prison camps. For the latter, even the most conservative estimates are in the millions.

"Robertson drew attention to one of the great scandals of American life. "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. Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, "We here in America make up 5% of the world's population but we make up 25% of the [world's] jailed prisoners.""

Obviously rates are more relevant than absolute numbers for policy analysis, here. But yeah, our prison population is absolutely enormous.

Did they also kill fewer people? Please shut the fuck up and stop cherry-picking comments to support your bullshit.

>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

Oh wow, really? Maybe the USSR never surpassed it because people kept fucking dying in the Gulag.

No. Lots of people died in the Gulag, but not enough to switch these numbers.

Most Soviet deaths occurred as a result of (deliberately engineered) famine.

And how did that work out for all the un-incarcerated people in Ukraine?

Would you care to do a "contrast and compare" between Soviet gulag conditions and those in a typical contemporary U.S. prison?

I thought not.

Nobody is suggesting that Stalin was not one of the worst totalitarian tyrants ever. He is personally responsible for more deaths than anyone else, and possibly even Hitler.

And yet, somehow, the US manages to lock more people in prison than this totalitarian scumbag. That should be food for thought for anyone with half a brain.

I guess we're grasping for distractions now, so what about hte half a million people the United States killed in Iraq, eh???? What about the millions of people who'll die as a result of US engineered climate change?

Of course, none of these diversions have anything to do with, you know, the topic at hand.

He did kill about 20 million so it's not sch a fair comparison.