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by mapt 64 days ago
Death rates are particularly hard to compare because part of the idea of El Salvador's system is that people are expected to die there - there is no release policy - yet most of them are young healthy men recently detained.

If we just look at incarceration rates:

CECOT is one facility, but around 2% of El Salvador's population has been imprisoned by Bukele's operation.

In 1950 the USSR had a population of around 180 million, and the gulag system was at its height with a population of 2.5 million, very similar.

The US prison system has been around 1% from the peak of the War On Drugs until recent fads in liberalized sentencing, currently holding at 0.7%, one of the highest in the world if you exclude ethnic purges like Xinjiang or Gaza.

1 comments

Imagine how lost your morale compass needs to be to defend Stalin because you don't like Trump.

Apart for the fact that people were released from El Salvador system, the population percentage is wrong for El Salvador, USSR and US, the difference between slavery camps and a penal system, Gaza not being a prison.

But what are you really saying, that the 200-500 dead in El Salvador, most non associated with Trump, makes Trump equivalent with Stalin's 15 million dead? Does that make sense?

I'm not sure you're replying to the right person. I didn't make that claim. I tried to provide meaningful numerical context of mass incarceration.

You state that I have errors - could you point them out?