It is worth pointing out that the American penal system is already distressingly close to the scope of the gulag system in Stalinist Russia. The gulag system hit a high of 1.5m prisoners in the 1940s out of a population of 168m (pre war), or about 0.89%. America’s prison population peaked in 2009 at an estimated 0.754%. If you include parole that shoots up to 3.1%, but I’m not sure how to compare that to the gulag system

Wildly different death tolls though. Our best estimate is that the gulag system had an 8.88% death rate, with that varying wildly on a year by year basis. Meanwhile the US prison system as of 2018 kills 344 per 100,000, or .344%. But unfortunately those numbers are getting worse, not better. I think the difference here is less about our system being more humane, and more the fact that food and antibiotics are cheap. Heck, just look at how the prison system responded to covid.

I honestly think we’re a lot closer to a gulag system than people think. We’ve already built the majority of the machinery to actually implement such a system, and politically making the system harsher and less humane is very popular. There is also a bipartisan consensus that what we need is to fund the system even more. All that we’re missing is the jump to directly imprisoning political opponents, and we’ve already seen some calls for that although it isn’t quite mainstream yet.