Storytime! Mostly because holy shit this is weighing on my mind like mad, and I need to vent. Living in USA.

Someone in my life allegedly did something bad last weekend. I found out by getting a phone call from the local jailhouse on their behalf yesterday morning. I'm their contact, found their legal help, and been drug along part of the process. Holy FUCK is it absolutely insane the shit you have to do. The predatory-ass system has you completely fucked if you're poor. A fucking five thousand dollar payment for bail, that they allow only the panicked voice of the detainee to inform you about, so you likely jump right in and take action and pay that bail before the arraignment trial where the prices can be reduced, or he can even be up and set free. Dont have the money? That's okay! You can pay 10% if you put some substantially valued aspect of your life up for collateral. The referenced suggestions? A house and a car. Now if they fuck up before their trial, you lose basically everything. And lord, don't even get me started on the sentence times. Threatening the lad with twenty years for some alleged not-severe crimes, the boy hasn't even lived for that long, so he panics and talks before we can get legal council to him. Anyone with a single look from the outside can tell he's not getting anything near that, but they wave it over his head like it's a looking threat he's gotta serve.

If any of you go through this process, I swear, it becomes apparent as day that this whole thing is built to incentivize you to remain in jail. To stay as cheap prison labor or whatever it may be. This whole process is fucked. I haven't even seen the legal fees yet.

I agree with your overall point, still I think there needs to be some context.

Here is the graph for USSR's prison population (I could only find it in russian on yandex, because search engines are so fucked up nowadays):

USSR really did have a relatively high imprisonment rate throughout its existence, and I think its punishment-focused penitentiary system was one of its worst sides. I'm glad that other socialist states are improving theirs, and I hope one day they can reach a point where prisons in their current form would no longer be necessary.

As an aside, I find it really interesting that there was a simultaneous increase in prison population in both USSR and the US in the 80s:

While in the US it was mainly caused by "law and order" politics popularized after the revolutionary movements of the 70s, combined with privatization of prison labor, I couldn't find any well-sourced explanations for why it happened in USSR.

Owners get richer,

The more people they put in,

Concentration camps

What are USA numbers now? That's the only way this is in context.

Currently a total of 1.9 M across all incarceration systems: https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-imprisonment-statistics/

This is a little confusing, because the flag on the left is the flag of the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union was (a) a confederation of countries and (b) not fully incorporated until 1955 under the Warsaw Pact. It's a bit weird to count "prisoners under the USSR" as a political block, but only count "prisoners under the United States" as a single country. Would make more sense to count all the prisoners in all the NATO countries against their populations, as point of comparison.

Also, inevitably has to be asked, because "Black Book" assholes love doing this, but... 1950 was very close to the end of WW2. So, how many of these 2.5M prisoners were wearing little swastika armbands five years earlier?