A quick and drunk google:
-
In 1939 the Soviet Union had around 171m people. At the end of 1940 there were about 1.5m people in gulags - 0.87% of the population
-
In 2023 the USA had 664k prisoners and a population of 337m - 0.19%
Over the course of 40 years, 14-18m people went through the gulags, and over 1.5m people died.
664k seems very low. Gonna sober SearX this.
edit: It looks like the 664k number is of people in local jails. (Jail Inmates in 2023, BJS) A small portion in the whole of the incarceration system of the US. The same gov site shows the prison population at 1.254 million in 2023 (Prisons Report Series, 2023, BJS). The site prisonpolicy.org shows 5.5 million people under control of the US justice system in 2025. 2 million of those people are in a correctional facility of some kind. The population of the US from the last census in 2024 is 340 million. This is just quick search on a couple of sources, I no longer want to be sober.
We’re at least double that for prison population. 664k is closer to jail populations, so short term incarceration and people being held during and before their trial that will them into the prison population.
Prison + jail is something like 2 million.
In 2023 the usa had 1.8m prisoners, so around 0.53% of its population.
-
Ah! This meme gets me everytime! I was about to post this on FB, but then read the bottom line. You silly meme, tricked me again.
This is a misinformation meme that gets reposted from time to time. Relative to the population, the USSR at it’s worst had about 2x more prisoners than the USA at it’s worst (so far).
With the new ice budget it seems like the USA republicans will be trying to beat Stalin’s numbers, but so far, this meme is still blatant misinformation.
A link to an old discussion about it: https://lemmy.world/comment/6354847
Another of my comments from then, with some actual statistics for the USSR:
I find back about that it peaked at 1.4% or 1.5% in 1950 in a few sources: 2.5m to 2.7m prisoners for about 180m citizens. So significantly higher than what you found.
On Quora a Russian posted a nice graph, but I don’t see a source for the data : https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-Soviet-citizens-were-incarcerated-at-any-given-time-The-US-has-0-7-of-its-population-in-prison-and-I-was-wondering-how-that-compares-to-the-old-USSR
Having read testimonies of the nazino island gulag and a few Russian prisoner novels, the Soviet prison system really shouldn’t be compared to the USA one. Those percentages might not be far off (“only” 2x more at the worst), but numbers don’t tell everything. Stalin’s reign of terror was so much worse than the modern day USA dystopia. Compare the USA to modern day Canada or western Europe and it will highlight much better how bad it is doing.
If you read closely there’s a second line in the picture saying “just kidding, that’s in the US today”. No claim is made about the USSR under Stalin.
Yet it still wants to draw the impression that the then USA prison system is somehow comparable or worse to Stalin’s gulags. That’s the thing about implying something: even if it’s not explicitly stated, it’s still part of the message.
Omissions of key facts, misrepresentation, just asking questions, dog whistles, unspoken implications, … None of those are explicitly stating what they are implying, so should I just accept stinking memes like those because whatever falsehood they are implying is not spelled out word for word? Well I’m not, I’m going to continue calling them out as misinformation.
I’ve made 2 other comments in the oldest comment chain of why I find this particular meme so awful, but I’m not going to give the same replies in each new chain.
Do you not understand math, percentages, or numbers? Or that it’s speaking of today, and not what it was 40 years ago?
The claim is that RIGHT NOW if you were to count up every prisoner from around the globe, 22% would US prisoners.
Now I have no idea if that statement is actually true or not, but the arguments you’re making against it have dick all to do with what the meme claims.
1950 is 75 years ago, not 40. I won’t bother with the rest of your math, just thought I’d pick the low hanging fruit.
I can’t resist to add though, that this meme is drawing a direct comparison between the present USA prison system and the USSR gulag system at it’s worst and somehow wants us to believe that the USA is worse. Now I get that tankjes are all about misinformation and misrepresentation, but I still believe this is an absolutely awful comparison to make.
I don’t really uave a horse in this, but why won’t you address the actual claim made in the meme?
You called it misinformation, but never once contradicted the actual claim: The US prison population is 22% of the world prison population
They aren’t disputing the information presented. Simply the context of associating it with an image of stalin. Sort of sane washing him. It’s definitely bad that the United States does this. But it’s also definitely bad that it keeps getting reposted in this sort of context as a propaganda tool.
Two things can be bad. Why couldn’t meme just ask what country does this? Then end with “the United states”. I’d argue it would be just as impactful. Without having to downplay the horrors of another group.
This is an old meme, it’s easy to look up a fact check, here’s one: https://www.truthorfiction.com/under-stalin-repression-was-so-severe-that-soviet-gulags-held-22-of-the-worlds-prison-population/
But the meme was not about that percentage, Stalin’s ussr had a much higher % of the population incarcerated and consequently also very likely a much higher percentage of the world prison population than the USA has now. This is not checked in the fact check and I doubt enough numbers are even available, it’s just deduction from population numbers. The meme doesn’t care about it either, it’s just doing Godwin’s law to draw a comparison of USA prisons to something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_tragedy It might as well have been a meme comparing Nazi concentration camps with USA prisons (not the new republican ones that are being opened now, but the ones at the time the meme was made). It’s a completely misappropriate comparison to make.
It wouldn’t matter if Stalin had 80% of the world’s prison population… the meme is meant to shock you that the USA could even be in the same order of magnitude by having nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population in modern times while having less than 5% of the world’s total population. That seems stalinesque.
Compare it to western Europe or Canada and people will be shocked as well.
Compare it to Stalin’s gulags or call it stalinesque and I am appalled. Stalin’s gulags were so much worse that the comparison is either made out of historical revisionism or out of ignorance. And since this meme first appeared in a period when Putin was working on historical revisionism, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it was deliberate misinformation.
Why do you think it’s comparing that at all? It gives no hint to the gulag, USSR, or any other time period.
What direct comparison are you talking about?
The only comparison is the image of the readers head of stalin ussr and the USA. Their is nothing direct other than the 22% claim.
The only claim it makes about the ussr is that was ruled by stalin.
USA by itself is not 22% of the world population. No, I didn’t even do the math yet…let’s see, if there’s 8 Billion people, and USA has 300 million, that’s uh…less than 10%, let’s leave it at that.
It’s talking about the world’s PRISON population not the world’s population as a whole 🤦
Lol. Not population. PRISON population. Jesus
Hopefully, they’ll reach 100% soon.
22% of 8b (world population) is 1.8b, USA have 350m people… This meme is misleading and dumb.
edit: oh jeez, look like I’m not the only one who read it wrong.
You missed a word reading that sentence. Its 22% of the world prison population.
It’s not talking about total population but % of people in prison worldwide
One in every four or five people incarcerated anywhere in the entire world will be in America.
And ICE just got a big budget bump to send that number to the stratosphere.
still climbing
It’s literally doing the opposite, liar (and/or reposter of ancient memes), lol.
It peaked around 2008, at ~24.7%. By 2015, it had fallen to 21%. By 2020, it was 20%.
Data from 2022 indicates the share has continued to trend downwards, though apparently most countries don’t report these statistics as often as the US does, and that seems to be the reason I can’t find a more recent ‘percent of the world’s’ figure. Still, given that it’s been less than the 22% in the meme for at least a decade, I can confidently stand by the first thing I said here.
I just made the meme, so “liar” I suppose lol but honestly I was more making a joke about the new concentration camps being made and how whatever the number is now, it’s going to climb a lot.
whatever the number is now, it’s going to climb a lot.
But, again, it’s literally doing the opposite of climbing, and hasn’t been climbing for ~15 years.
It’s a near-worthless figure anyway—if I have 100 apples and 15 of them are rotten, and you have 5 apples which are all rotten, then I have 75% of all the rotten apples, while you only have 25%. But only 15% of mine are, while 100% of yours are. Which figure is more useful in gleaning information about how rotten person X’s apples are on average?
An actually-useful figure for a country is what percentage of that country’s population is incarcerated.
It’s all good, we’re shipping them to prisons abroad now
They’re tryna build a prison (for you and me to live in)
System of a Down wasn’t lying.
B.Y.O.B. is another one that’s unfortunately relevant XD
I still can’t believe their drummer is a MAGA-idiot. I guess his drum set must have drowned out any of Tankian’s or Malakian’s vocals.
Stalin just killed them right away.
The empire needs cheap labor, and there’s nothing cheaper than free…
It’s not free. It’s paid for by taxpayers at much higher rates. Rehabilitation is actually cheaper in the long run, but then you don’t get the labor.
But if you don’t have any easily exploitable underclass, how are you going to scare the middle class into compliance? Huh? Checkmate libruls!
Traditionally, you’d pay the middle class well and then bring in migrants that you can exploit quite easily.
This however does not maximise short term profit, because the pay sheet is eating into that.
So you need to lower the middle class wages, but then you have open rebellion when they earn about the same as the
slavesmigrants. So you need to get rid of the migrants, so that the middle class can take their place.And that’s how I met ICE.
The people profiting don’t pay taxes.
It’s less about labour and more about isolating and capitalizing harmful assets. The politics of capitalism mandate that you squeeze value out the plebs, whether that be for money or political capital.
Disenfranchising belligerent communities from their rights while creating surplus you can bleed from the state into the hands of your supporters is a simple win win scenario that’s been utilized in the US since before we even became a country.
Thank you for the clarification! And how depressing, lol.
deleted by creator
Private prisons are more of a symptom than a cause. I think only around 8% of the prison population are housed at private prisons.
The main driver of America’s prison system really began in a response to the civil rights movement with “the war on drugs”.
Prisoners are charged for their time being locked up. They have to pay them back if they’re ever freed.
Prison labor isn’t free, they still get paid. They don’t get paid a “fair” wage, but they do get paid to skirt slavery just barely enough.
Also they cost taxpayers more to keep in prison than if they were abusing welfare and not working and someone else was paid a “fair” wage to do the same work prisoners do.
It would be nice if they were paid a fair wage for their work and were rehabilitated so taxpayers didn’t have to subsidize prisoner exploitation for as long, but that would be too “commie”.
I’m sure the right people are getting whatever money that’s seemingly mismanaged, lol.
but they do get paid to skirt slavery just barely enough.
It’s slavery explicitly banned in US everywhere except in prison?
Correct. The trick is that liberals like to think of themselves as good people. Good people don’t have slaves, so they’re still paid a bit. Problem solved as far as liberals are concerned.
Slavery is legal as a form of legal punishment in the US. Not joking.
Yes, slavery is illegal in America under the 13th amendment, which also allows for unpaid prison labor.
And it’s about to skyrocket way higher.
Funny thing is the numbers are pretty close, of course the ussr also had normal prisons and had a lower population but still the us is pretty fucking bad.
Statistily speaking… Americans must be the most dishonest people of any country … Since it has the highest number of prison inmates per capita…
Unless of course most aren’t actually there for … Crimes
No, they’re there for crimes. the issue is that the crimes are often fucking stupid and these people don’t deserve to be in the prison system for them. Doing drugs should not land you in prison. Period. It shouldn’t even be illegal to do drugs. People who have an addiction problem should be receiving treatment. Not punishment. But we have a prison slave population we need to maintain in order to keep the owners of private prisons’ wallets fat.
I wonder if the whole country could be considered a prison if you’re not allowed to leave it
They should call it “Australia”.
Does this number include the Uyghurs?
