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As I’ve already stated repeatedly, I see exclusion of parole completely arbitrary. You could argue that it’s not equivalent certainly, but you can’t just dismiss it.

All you’ve said about it before was that you thought it was “splitting hairs” once. What do you suppose we do with probation then? Is there a Soviet purge-era equivalent with a measure we can compare?

we’re comparing peak incarceration rate in USS right after the revolution with incarceration in US when its functioning regularly

Well, that’s what we sought to compare. Both you and EgoCom claimed stuff like “US incarceration rate is higher than what USSR had during Stalin’s purges”.

The fact that USSR numbers drop significantly over time while US numbers do not, is what’s really key here.

It’s hard to have numbers drop a frick ton when you’ve had no arbitrary purging of ideas that led to gulag-levels of arrests.

Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976.[3]

[3] By way of comparison, in 1995, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the United States there were 1.6 million in prison, three million on probation, and 700,000 on parole, for a total of 5.3 million under correctional supervision (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/1/96).

I don’t think labor camps and prison are comparable to probation and parole. Do you still want to include probation and parole? If not, I think we can safely conclude that the Soviet Union was much more authoritarian. (If you adjust it by capita, you’d have a US prison population of 1.03 million Soviet heads, which is only a few ten thousands more than half the Soviet population.) If yes, why?

Fine, we are both picking figures. If you think the numbers I gave are wrong, give me sourced numbers about the same thing that are right.

Where is the incarceration rate? People getting held pre-trial is a problem, yes, but even then, the gulag held 2.5 million at their height in the 1950s, and that’s not even counting anyone pre-trial or adjusting for the population difference between 1950s Soviet Union and modern day USA.

I am comparing to the incarceration rate today. In 2022, the incarceration rate was 700 per 100,000. Unless you have evidence that that rate more than doubled in two years, I don’t see how the US has a higher incarceration rate.

Call me stupid all you want, do you still think incarceration vs. correctional supervision is splitting hairs?

If you think I’m undercounting, show me a rate of incarceration per the same amount of heads for both the United States and Soviet Union. According to https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-009-9430-2, page 465, “At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the institutionalized population was over 2.5 million, or 1,558 prisoners per 100,000 population (Table 1). This incarceration rate was ten times that of the United States for the same year.” I can email you a PDF of this paper if you want. Even in modern times, the population has been decreasing since 2013 until 2022, and according to Vox, the highest per 100,00 adults never passed 700.

It’s “amazing” how all you focus on is the intelligence part while completely ditching the difference between probation and incarceration. Of course there’s a difference between being held in a cell and having what’s basically a search warrant on you for every step of your life by court order. And on intelligence, even if you completely disregard the judicial vulnerability, the US surveillance agencies still hold far less domestic power than the KGB’s domestic cell.

USSR having double of course isn’t comparable, and the US prison rate has been going down (well, at least until 2019, after which we got COVID and prison rates saw a gigantic dip that has been climbing bit by bit since, but still lower than 2019).

And no, it’s not just splitting hairs. There’s a difference between being constantly surveiled and watched by the state, temporarily (at least nominally); and getting locked up in a festering environment where they neglect your good feeding and, in the USSR’s case, your well-being and being forced to labor, with a much stronger KGB.

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Unfortunately, that’s like saying everyone has the right to read any book that IA usually archives for free at any time. Do I agree with that? Yes. Does it hurt intellectual property? Yes. There’s obviously evidence that readers used the service a lot. I agree with the principle, but they should’ve just temporarily “merged” with public libraries and increased borrowing limits for books in stock, not allow everyone in the United States to just get a book as long as they have less than 9 other books as well.

I only counted those incarcerated. You’re counting community service, probation, parole, etc. And my sources are The Guardian and this academic journal.

https://lemmy.ml/post/17103219/11784747

McNamara seemed to suggest that publishers would have been further enriched if not for IA providing unprecedented free, unlimited e-books access.

— https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-internet-archive-hurt-sales/, linked in a link in the article

The actual reason most anarchist places fail is because they lack military power. Places that are actually recognized like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania still run today.

My point is that the United States is indeed much less authoritarian. Saying that there’s no such thing as a state that’s more authoritarian or less authoritarian is denying reality.

Having poorly made police officers is way worse than have state policies of persecuting ideas and even forms of art. Unlike what would happen in the USSR, Snowden’s leaks were not blocked and promoters of the leak weren’t hunted down (except for Snowden himself, which would happen in most countries), and you are free to discuss here without being banned.