GULAG - a good idea or a bad idea?

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I'm a fan of penal colonies where prisoners are sent to a tropical island where they will perform agricultural work during their sentence and this would cut the cost of production, as variable costs (wages) go down

Loz wrote:

I'm sure there are many tropical islands just waiting for penal colonies...

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A work camp has multiple benefits over prisons:work helps convicts to rehabilitate,and the whole society benefits from their work.

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This argument isn't true. The Gulags indeed produced some value ($3'500'000'000). But the costs where higher. The camps never produced any profit. You could indeed say they produced raw material. But you can't say the society had any benefit of it.

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Where did you get this value?

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Economy of the Gulag

The use of forced labor in remote areas was intended to `s economic" surpluses "to provide, under the Marxist sense of 'value' to the unfree workers by only the most necessary to spend (considerably below the normal wage workers) to take this product to produce a significant economic value. Forced labor was supposed to be more mobile deployable than hired labor because the forced laborers in large numbers quickly from one project to another could be moved. Forced labor was also assumed as a mobile resource economic surpluses without loss of labor, as was the case with regular hired labor. Strict management and supervision, as was thought and hoped, would make forced labor as productive as free labor. [4]

Another important reason for the gulag was, as expressed in an internal document Gulag, "the industrial exploitation and colonization of distant areas of the state", in places where ordinary workers would not live and work because of the remoteness, lack of normal facilities and the harsh climate.

The Gulag camps were initially determined not economically profitable. Only mid-twenties by Naftali Frenkel, a prisoner at the Solovetski islands which rose to from below Solovetski camp commander, found a way to a prison camp into an apparently profitable economic factor. This he achieved by giving food to the prisoners according to the amount of work they had done. This system is then by Stalin and Kaganovich in all camps throughout the Soviet Union made what then led to millions of unfortunates under the toughest conditions (hunger, cold, poor housing, clothing and footwear) terribly hard work which many died. The system of Frenkel was very simple. First, all the perks and frills stop put. The workers (prisoners) were divided into 3 groups according to their physical abilities: those who could do heavy work, those who could do light work and the disabled. Each group received other kinds of work and set standards to which should be fulfilled (otherwise the ration was halved). Under the workload they were fed with fairly large differences in diet: the lowest group was approximately half the maximum. In practice this system sorted very quickly in those prisoners who would survive and who would perish. This process was accelerated by the often very high work standards were created especially for city people who never had done hard work and felling trees, rocks, sculpture, lugging and dragging it, etc. [5]

In fact, the forced labor system of the Gulag never yielded profits. Prison Labor is always much less productive than free labor - a lesson the Soviets after the death of Stalin understood.