Were gulags actually terrible places to be or was it just a place to reform counter-revolutionaries? The term “re-education” still sounds creepy though.
One way people justify the existence of prisons nowadays is by claiming their purpose is to rehabilitate people they consider to pose a danger to society. That is they can unlearn whatever caused them to commit crimes and change their behavior. I think re-education is a very similar concept applied to a more ideologically strict society.
Gulags were not a great place to be by any accounts, but the conditions in US prisons are actually worse by pretty much every metric. This is a detailed read on how the system operated back in Stalin days.
Were gulags actually terrible places to be or was it just a place to reform counter-revolutionaries? The term “re-education” still sounds creepy though.
One way people justify the existence of prisons nowadays is by claiming their purpose is to rehabilitate people they consider to pose a danger to society. That is they can unlearn whatever caused them to commit crimes and change their behavior. I think re-education is a very similar concept applied to a more ideologically strict society.
i hope the takeaway from that is that prisons are unjustifiable, and not that gulags, or other forms of supposed re-education, are justifiable.
Gulags were not a great place to be by any accounts, but the conditions in US prisons are actually worse by pretty much every metric. This is a detailed read on how the system operated back in Stalin days.