[Aloisius]

> It currently dwarfs the number incarcerated by the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

Not really. Estimates for the number of people in labor camps, labor colonies and prisons are all over the place, but based on their own fragmented records reached about 2 million by the end of 1938. That doesn't count pretrial/administrative detentions or the hundreds of thousands that were simply executed that year or all the people exiled to inhospitable settlements. And of course, the mortality rate in their penal system was extremely high.

> In the Southeast United States, incarceration rate of the Black population is 7%

Nowhere in the US is there anywhere close to incarcerating 7% of the black population.

That said, the US incarceration rate is ridiculously high and we should be ashamed of it.