Fun fact: Under George W Bush, we had the same incarceration rates as the Soviet union's worst rates after Stalin. And from the data it looks like the sentence lengths were 2 to 3 times longer than under the soviets. Also in the USSR once you got out of prison you had a vocation and a job waiting for you, and you wouldn’t starve on the streets or die of exposure from homelessness. When people call us a police state we believe the USSR was a nightmare and nothing like us. We make the USSR look like a bunch of nice guys and utopia.