The article above seems fundamentally flawed in many respects. It is interesting that the main countries you claim have, or had, higher jail populations are all America’s enemies (mostly Communist). If involuntary labour adds to the jail population you seem to have overlooked America’s slavery era, and British Empire slave economies. How would that compare to the USSR. Also, how many Serfs were in Imperialist (Capitalist) Russia compared to indentured workers in Siberia in the evil Communist Russia?
Going further back, I am sure slavery in the Roman Empire was quite high. Remember, you are discussing highest ever jail population.
More theoritically, your Cambodia example seems a little biased too. As are we not all forced to provide our labour through limited forms of cohersion? It is almost as if you are saying, forcing people to work for their community is involuntary work, while forcing to work for yourself is freedom. Regardless of the moral inclinations and emotive responses, surely you should attach the same rules to all.
Your whole post appears mistaken based upon this simple misstatement of what Cecil said. Cecil never said involuntary labour adds to the jail population, nor did he imply it. He included in “jail” population people who are in forced labor CAMPS. It’s not enough to be forced to work for the “state” or some local official (which would be serfdom, for example). We are talking people who are forcibly removed from where they live and put into a restricted area from which they are not allowed to leave. Thus, the statement about Cambodia, where the populace wasn’t just forced to work (similar to Russia’s communes), but was forcibly relocated to labor camps.
Manzanar’s internees were prisoners. America’s slave population is a closer parallel, but not all slaves were restricted to a limited area. People sent to gulags were prisoners; Russia’s serfs were not.
That is a strange definition - as this seems to suggest the involuntary labour can be considered as part of the jail population, depending on the where they work not the hierarchical structures that force them to work.
Serfs were in CAMPS, in the same sense as gulag workers. They were considered property, and until reforms in the late 19th century, they were slaves and COULD be forcibly removed. Up until the 1917 revolution they were still forced to stay in their owner’s land. You seem to suggest forcibly moving workers to work in a certain area constitutes a prison inmate, whereas forcing the same person to do exactly the same thing in the area they were born does not constitute ‘inmate’ status.
By your logic, Jews born in the Polish ghetto in Warsaw were not inmates during WWII, but those moved into the ghetto were.
American/British slaves were clearly forcibly removed from the place of birth and forced to work - fulfilling your criteria as involuntary labour.
To me the distinction seems to be that people in jails or labor camps were put there, and are under the control of, the government. Slaves in America were not brought here by the government, but by individuals, and were in general not working for the government but for individuals. I’m not familiar with the serf situation in Russia, so I can’t address that issue.
If you are born in a village, and the law says you cannot leave the area around your village, so you end up living your whole life within say 5 miles of the village, that’s not the same thing as a camp, where you were born and were living somewhere else, then were forced by the state to go live within a VERY narrow and prescribed area (a few hundred yards at most). Yes, we can postulate fuzzy borderline cases, but the distinction still remains: jail/prison = a small building or patch of probably fenced land to which you are sent and cannot leave, which includes such things as labor camps.
I understand your underlying concept, that there isn’t much difference between being forced to work where you were born, and being forced by the state to go to a camp and work, but I think that, if you were to ask a serf of Russia in the 19th Century if they would prefer to live and work where they were born, or be sent to some equivalent of a gulag, the answer would be pretty predictable.
Labor camps and prisons are different in other very important ways too.
In a labor camp, you do your forced work, but you pretty much live your life. You enjoy sunshine, you can have a girlfriend or a wife, have hobbies and socializing. It’s, well, a camp.
Another distinction, interesting in the discussion of the original question, is why the prisoners got sent there. E.g., Stalin and others did it to hide people who spoke out against them, and thus to raise these leaders’ popularity in their country. Meanwhile, politicians in our democracy making a showing of how great they are because they increase prison sentences (instead of hiring more police or solving economic problems) to do the same thing.
Another point to make, to tie the above two together: American prisons are a lot more like happy-fun-time-socializing-symposiums than places of slow torture.
Given that the prime examples of “labor camps” were the concentration camps used by the Nazis during World War II, you may wish to rethink this characterization of labor camps. :dubious:
<quote>…the prime examples of “labor camps” were the concentration camps used by the Nazis…</quote>But “labor camp” was a euphemism in that case. Indeed, even “concentration camp” was a euphemism; the American camps that innocent American citizens were sent to for the crime of having Japanese ancestors were concentration camps. Auschwitz and the rest were death camps.