You don't think permanent removal is at least part of the point of prisons/jails? Seems like there are quite a few people who think of prisons as a way to get rid of "undesirables" and there has been a constant push to speed up death penalty proceedings. The entire probation/parole system seems like a way to keep people coming back.

I agree that in a microcosm and at the individual level it's a removal of undesirables, and it works that way in rich locales, but there are way more poor people than there are rich people, and way more poor prisoners than rich prisoners.

The problem is that prison industrial complex needs bodies. The other extractive bit of this is that the revolving door of US jails justify the thin blue line's enormous extraction of local resources. The majority of the imprisoned in the US are in jails waiting arraignment. It's a revolving door. These people end up being locked out of a real life because the system is punitive, and feeds itself. So while it does control where populations of people are, it is not a permanent removal in the same way where you empty San Francisco of all Japanese people and move them all to empty land.

Plus the entire system was built around putting black people in prison to continue slavery. How is that not permanent removal? The US has basically just been making baby steps towards prison reform for 100+ years so it isn't quite as blatant these days, but literally millions of people have been permanently removed by it

Remember that slavery is not removal. Death is not removal. Slavery is extraction. The US is not removing black people, it is trapping them. That's the history of slavery and anti-slave patrols that seeps into law enforcement. It's a strategic difference that implies a difference of intent. We are not removing communities, towns, neighborhoods etc, of the black population to force them into slavery. We are trapping individuals in the legal system which in aggregate affects those communities, towns, and neighborhoods but we are not "emptying the cities".

Notably the comparison falls apart a little because originally gulag were often seeded with mass population transfers, but towards the middle/end of the soviet union gulags had a stable enough rotating population to simply shard a larger camp into smaller camps at the periphery. By that time people were sentenced to gulags individually rather than transferred en-masse.

It's a fuzzy distinction for sure, but the main distinction is that we're moving bodies one by one, not street by street/neighborhood by neighborhood/town by town/etc.