If, Buddha-willing, we get another shot at this shit and get the chance to try and enact a dictatorship of the proletariat, what do comrades here think we should actually do regarding prison systems, e.g. for political enemies? What do we think of reeducation camps? How should they be organised?
Good that you posted this as the USSR and more generally the penal systems of past socialist projects are definitely something we should be studying comparatively and critically to get a sense of what works and what doens't. Obviously that can only help us, not give us a panacea because our conditions are very different. That being said I don't really understand comrades who seem intent of justifying every aspect of the soviet penal system, many of which were pretty unjustifiable in all honesty (like the use pf psychiatry to pathologize alot of criminals) but tell you alot about the conditions of the USSR's emergence, the violence behind its survival and the effect this had on the state, party and bureacracy, as well as people more broadly.