Teaching Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in Prison | Scheerpost

Scott

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Just finished reading the article with the same name as this thread over at Scheerpost. Written by well known journalist Chris Hedges, I thought it was really good. Perhaps might engender a bit of good discussion on U.S. prisons. The introduction, quoted below, goes into the hardships of U.S. prisons, but the article is about a lot more than that.

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December 19, 2022

There are many disturbing similarities between the brutality imposed on Stalin’s victims and the injustices endured by the incarcerated in federal and state prisons.

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost

Two nights a week for the last four months, I plowed my way through the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago with 17 students in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system. No one in my class endures the extremities imposed on the millions who worked as slave labor, and often died, in the Soviet gulag, or work camps, set up after the Russian revolution. The last remnants of the hundreds of camps were disbanded in 1987 by Mikhail Gorbachev, himself the grandson of gulag prisoners. Nor do they experience the treatment of those held in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and our secret black sites who undergo mock trials and executions, torture, extreme sensory deprivation and abuse that comes disturbingly close to replicating the hell of the gulag.

Nevertheless, what Solzhenitsyn underwent during his eight years as a prisoner in the labor camps was familiar to my students, most of whom are people of color, poor, often lacking competent legal representation and almost always coerced into signing confessions or accepting plea deals that include crimes, or versions of crimes they were involved with, which were often false. Over 95 percent of prisoners are pressured to plead out in the U.S. court system, which is not capable of providing jury trials for every defendant entitled to one, were they to actually demand one. In 2012, the Supreme Court said that “plea bargaining . . . is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.”

My students, like Soviet prisoners, or zeks, live in a totalitarian system. They too work as bonded laborers, putting in 40-hour work weeks at prison jobs and being paid $28 a month, money used to buy overpriced basic necessities in the commissary, as was true in the gulag. They too are identified by their assigned numbers, wear prison uniforms and have surrendered the rights that come with citizenship.

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Full article:
https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/19/teaching-aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-the-gulag-archipelago-in-prison/
 
My students, like Soviet prisoners, or zeks, live in a totalitarian system.
People in American inmates had due process and were convicted of felony crimes by a jury of their peers.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was arrested while fighting for his country against German Nazis, he received no due process, and his 'crime' was writing a private letter to a friend which was mildly critical of Stalin.
 
**My students, like Soviet prisoners, or zeks, live in a totalitarian system.**

Full article:
https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/19/teaching-aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-the-gulag-archipelago-in-prison/

People in American inmates had due process and were convicted of felony crimes by a jury of their peers.

It seems you didn't read the end of the previous paragraph. I'll quote it again:

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Over 95 percent of prisoners are pressured to plead out in the U.S. court system, which is not capable of providing jury trials for every defendant entitled to one, were they to actually demand one. In 2012, the Supreme Court said that “plea bargaining . . . is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.”
**

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was arrested while fighting for his country against German Nazis, he received no due process, and his 'crime' was writing a private letter to a friend which was mildly critical of Stalin.

If your argument is that Stalin was worse than Biden, I can agree. But the injustice in the United States' justice system is still pretty bad.
 
It seems you didn't read the end of the previous paragraph. I'll quote it again:

**
Over 95 percent of prisoners are pressured to plead out in the U.S. court system, which is not capable of providing jury trials for every defendant entitled to one, were they to actually demand one. In 2012, the Supreme Court said that “plea bargaining . . . is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.”
**



If your argument is that Stalin was worse than Biden, I can agree. But the injustice in the United States' justice system is still pretty bad.

I am aware the criminal justice system in the USA needs substantial improvements. I didn't need an article to tell me that.

I also am aware that conflating the US justice system with the Stalinist Gulag is preposterous.
 
It seems you didn't read the end of the previous paragraph. I'll quote it again:

**
Over 95 percent of prisoners are pressured to plead out in the U.S. court system, which is not capable of providing jury trials for every defendant entitled to one, were they to actually demand one. In 2012, the Supreme Court said that “plea bargaining . . . is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.”
**

If your argument is that Stalin was worse than Biden, I can agree. But the injustice in the United States' justice system is still pretty bad.

I am aware the criminal justice system in the USA needs substantial improvements. I didn't need an article to tell me that.

I also am aware that conflating the US justice system with the Stalinist Gulag is preposterous.

I agree that conflating the 2 isn't right, but I do believe that comparing them is educational. I don't believe the U.S. justice system is as bad as Stalin's Gulags, but the fact that they are comparable should be cause for alarm and hopefully provides sufficient impetus to change this.
 
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