There are more people in US prisons now than were in Stalin's gulags.

[Igel]

9. Not everybody incarcerated in the USSR was in a GULag.

Many were in internal exile--not, strictly speaking, part of the GULag system. Internal exile could be fairly innocuous--exiling an academic from Moscow to Estonia, for example. Or less innocuous, exiling a dissident to a village in Siberia.

We also routinely ignore the numbers of dead from the GULags.

You want fun, compare any high-security prison with the accounts in Shalamov's "Kolyma Tales." And if you find a chance egregious account in the US, consider that Kolyma was the way the government and powers that be formally intended it to run.

Then there were the actual prisons and jails. Easy to fill them with whomever you want when the government is the employer and has the right to fire anybody--and then to imprison you because you have no official, legal means of support.

We'll ignore that the percentage of people at the GULag's height was based on a population a bit more than 1/2 of the current US population.

Yep, the rate of imprisonment is too high. Then again, so is the rate of some forms of criminality.