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Have you? [1] "The emergent consensus among scholars who utilize official archival data is that of the 18 million who were sent to the Gulag from 1930 to 1953,

• kragen 7y ago
  You seem to be saying that some 91% of GULAG prisoners survived their imprisonment, with some 67000 deaths per year on average; while GULAG population varied greatly during this time, if we assume an average of 1 million prisoners, we will not be far wrong. (The peak was officially 2.7 million, near the end of that period, slightly more than the current US incarcerated population.) This works out to a death rate of some 6700 deaths per 100'000 people per year, very roughly; this is clearly worse than the US prison system's mortality rate of 264 deaths per 100'000 people per year, by a factor of 20 or 30. (This figure does not include people who died as a result of their detention, but it seems safe to say that the number would be lower even if they were included.) But many, perhaps most, of those deaths were during the German invasion, which killed about 25 million of the 169 million subjects of the USSR (most of them not in GULAG). It remains to be seen how well the US cares for the populations of its prisons and concentration camps if it suffers an invasion that kills an eighth of its population. Hopefully such an event will remain safely in the realm of speculation.