• @BendingUnit@midwest.social
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    32 years ago

    The gulag system in America is so fucking horrifying and crazy. Anyone who thinks this is a free country is drastically removed from reality.

    • @vekku@sopuli.xyz
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      2 years ago

      Why would you call it a gulag system, when most people in the US are in prison because of crimes committed*, not political oppression? That is a defining characteristic of the term “gulag”. Is it because the pure numbers (per capita) are similar?

      * The drug war and the racism it’s built around are glaring exceptions, but still not anywhere near the totality of the gulag system

      • @BendingUnit@midwest.social
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        2 years ago

        I call it that for several reasons.

        1. What constitutes a crime is often, and increasingly, political.
        2. What pushes/forces people into crime is almost entirely political.
        3. The for-profit prison industrial complex and the slave labor it provides are DEEPLY bound up in politics.
        4. The for-profit (gulag) prison system here in the states is bigger, crueler and even less necessary than the one I was told in school was SO scary and such a crime against humanity.
        5. Calling it a gulag system draws attention to the intentional cruelty that plagues this country, and (I hope) helps people consider that better methods are not only possible, they actually exist and work.