I know that Imperial Russia using prisoners to fight was a thing in the Russo-Japanese War, around 1908 or so, so that wasn't nearly that far back.

EDIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasion_of_Sakhalin

The Japanese occupied Sakhalin with minimal effort and low losses. The Russians suffered 181 dead and had 3,270 taken prisoner. The reasons for the low Russian resistance lay in the low morale of the soldiers, who were mostly prisoners and deportees with little or no military training.

Yeah, I felt like I watched a "Previously on" segment on a season finale without having watched the season.

My statement comes from months of what was being told in the news. In terms of estimates it was said that around 40k Russian prisioners were recruited. UK intelligence estimated 20k of them died in the first few months. There was also the famous rule of three cited where for every person killed, you can count roughly 3 people injured. With those figures, most prisoners are wounded or killed. The kind of battles were said to be brutal, my assumption was the wounded would not return to a normal life. My confusion stems for an honest attempt to understand the truth. The way I see it, either the killed and injured are not exaggerated and then we could say a small percentage of the prisioners are potentially problems or the numbers are not what they say they are and the problem of returning prisioners would be as worrisome as the article implies. Please excuse me when I said they are "all" going back. I failed to convey the gist of the contradiction correctly.

I fail to see what I had mentioned in the comment that lead you to believe that I thought wars have a 100% death rate or that the word casualty did not include the injured.

I seemed to have not conveyed what bothered me about the topic. Essentially the article states that a wave of crime awaits yet several previous articles stated that a big majority of the prisioners were killed. People fleeing were also said to have been shot and given the kind of gruesome tactics, being wounded would be life changing.

During the autumn and winter clashes at Bakhmut, the Wagner Group suffered huge losses. It is estimated that out of approximately 50,000 prisoners recruited in the second half of 2022, only about 10,000 continued their service at the end of January; the rest had been killed, wounded or deserted.>

https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2023-04-28/popasna-to-bakhmut-wagner-group-russia-ukraine-war

That was the situation in January, they took Bakhmut in May (with the battle getting much worse during the end). Given those numbers, I doubt that a wave of crime as stated seems realistic.

Would you send every veteran to prison, too?