New Course at Yale Will Compare U.S. Prisons to Soviet Gulags
“an investigation of the experience and purposes of mass incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century”
Anyone who has ever watched the National Geographic show ‘Locked Up Abroad’ knows that Americans imprisoned in other countries can’t wait to return to America, even an American prison.
Campus Reform reports:
US incarceration is brutal, just like Soviet and Nazi prisons, according to Yale profs
This fall, Yale University will offer a seminar that compares the United States prison system with the Soviet Union gulag.
Timothy Snyder, the well-known historian and author, will co-teach “Mass Incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States” next semester.
According to the course description, Snyder’s seminar is “an investigation of the experience and purposes of mass incarceration in the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century” and will have “intensive reading” which “includes first-person accounts of the Gulag and American prison as well as scholarly monographs on the causes of mass incarceration in different contexts.”
The Gulag was the system of forced-labor camps established under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Many of its inmates were political prisoners or figures targeted by communist regimes.
The Daily Mail described the Gulag as the place “where people were worked to death in Soviet labour camps through the mid-1900s.” The British newspaper also states that, “Between 1929 and the year of Stalin’s death in 1953, 18million men and women were transported to Soviet slave labour camps in Siberia and other outposts of the Red empire – many of them never to return.”
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Comments
So Pelosi wishes to send Trump and certain Republican House Members to a gulag. Got it.
And I’ve begun to compare academe to a mental institution for people with the capacity of a six-year-old
Has anyone bothered to ask whether Timothy Snyder, (“well-known historian and author”) actuall knows anything about how U.S. prisons compare with those of the now-infamous Soviet Gulag, or those in any other country?
And if so, has Snyder taken care to present a balanced view (instead of, for example, cherry-picking an anecdote here and a story there) of the issue?
In short, did Snyder start with the question (“How do U.S. prisons compare with the Soviet Gulag, and prison systems in other countries”) or did this scholar start with the conclusions and then work back toward finding evidence to support it?