Here. One year of our research, including mine, on the fucking gulags.

  • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
    21·
    1 year ago

    Until 1952, all prisoners received 122 grams of grain, 10 grams of flour, 20 grams of sugar, 75 grams of fish, 500 grams of potatoes and vegetables, 15 grams of fat, 45 grams of meat, and 650 grams of bread each day.

    I’m bad at food math, but this seems like a lot of food for a prison. Inmates be living better than most civilians under capitalism.

    • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlOP
      19·
      1 year ago

      Very disparate numbers but more than enough. 120 grams of meat total which is a bit low on protein for me, but obviously they were not training bodybuilders here. Still, protein is useful if you do labour. They might have got it from the vegetables too depending on what these were. The 650g of bread alone could feed you for the entire day in terms of calories, depending on what was in the bread though (I’m using modern figures and industrial bread contains more than simply flour for calories). Not sure what you’d do with 10 grams of flour lol.

      122 grams of grain, if uncooked, is a good portion.

      Very carb-heavy which is not a problem by itself, I’m just thinking as a gym hobbyist.

      Overall more than enough calories even if they were doing demanding physical labour day in and day out.

  • ByteFoolish@lemmygrad.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thanks! I was looking it over and something stood out to me.

    For comparison, 2.8% of the United States population is currently incarcerated, millions more than were ever imprisoned in Soviet gulags.[1]

    Can I ask where that 2.8% figure came from? That’s almost 10 million people and seemed like it was quite high to me. I followed the reference number to a blog which has this quote:

    “In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice….

    I tried but I didn’t see this FLT-AP source in their references section and couldn’t find it with a quick Google. This is several times larger than the number reported by the Bureau of “Justice” so I wanted to check the source to see why there was such a large disparity. I’m not saying the figure is wrong, but maybe it would be helpful to briefly explain why there is such a stark difference from the government source.

    Also the prolewiki page says “currently incarcerated” and the reference is referring to nearly 30 years ago. The 2.8% figure could still be accurate, but maybe a different source should be used to back that up.

    Sorry for the criticism. I really do appreciate the work you and the other editors have put in! I know very little about this subject, but feel like I learned a bit by reading the page.

    • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the comment, this is actually something I’d raised in the talk page if we want to use this figure as a comparison: we need to know if they’re talking about incarcerated people or everyone “in the system” (parole, pre-trial, house arrest, etc) and the adult or entire population. We need to compare apples to apples so a thorough investigation is required on both the US numbers and the USSR numbers. I think for now I might remove this entire comparison, as it also kinda falls on the defensive like “oh but look how much worse the US is!”. Showing the USSR was far from the worst incarcerator (as it’s commonly believed you could be jailed for anything) is probably enough.

      • ByteFoolish@lemmygrad.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        Oh I didn’t know there were talk pages. Yeah I agree an apples to apples comparison would be good, but if you don’t have that it’s probably best to not include it.