What's more shocking, is that our prison population has reached an ominous milestone over the past few years. The number of Americans who were in jail and prison, or on probation and parole, was 7 million people by 2009. When you include former inmates who have since left our prison system, you wind up with 19 million people as of 2010. This number exceeds the 18 million people who endured the Soviet Gulag system, between 1929 and 1953.
While the conditions in the gulags were far worse than American prisons, our facilities still utilize slave labor and torture techniques like solitary confinement to keep their inmates in line. And with a per capita incarceration rate that might only be exceeded by countries like North Korea and Cuba, there's no reason to believe that the United States is still among the free nations of the world.
Comment: Conditions in U.S. prisons are anything but exemplary. The private for-profit system is a business, and the well-being of inmates is apparently of little concern. This highly profitable industry is rife with abuse, with the ACLU reporting numerous instances of poor medical care, lack of basic sanitation and a tendency to overuse extreme isolation of prisoners.