Read up on the gulags sometime.

It’s not a competition, we’ll probably look back at prisons in the future and be like “wtf were they thinking?” the same way our generation looks at previous generations and the normalization of slavery.

However, the vitriolic response that people have to the very idea that we could possibly be doing the same things is worthy of some introspection today.

The White Sea & Baltic Canal was dug by hand by Gulag prisoners. You can't be serious?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Conditions

We have hard labor. That's why the 13th amendment makes an exemption to the ban on slavery for prisoners.

In the gulags that effort was at least spent on public works projects, here it's to make rich people slightly richer with next to free labor.

There's hard labor and then there's "Among the prisoners there are some so ragged and liceridden that they pose a sanitary danger to the rest. These prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings. Lacking food . . . they collect orts [refuse] and, according to some prisoners, eat rats and dogs."

Mortality rate.

Which rate are you using on gulags? Both the Gulag Archipelago and Black Book of Communism have been disregarded by modern historians due to blatant inaccuracies.

Let’s use the Gulag administration’s own numbers. One and a half million.

How’s the death rate in the US prison system, then?

You have to account for age and gender. Prisoners are younger than average and overwhelming male. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/msp0114st.pdf (prisons); https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db328.htm (whole population).

If you look at Table 8, the death rate for 45-54 year olds in state prisons in 2014 was 342 per 100,000. For the 45-54 age group as a whole, the mortality rate was about 400 per 100,000. Note that the figure for prisons is mostly men, while the figures for the whole population is both men and women.

Accounting for the gender difference, the prison population has a lower death rate than the general population at the same age group. The difference is especially noticeable among younger prisoners. In the 25-35 demographic, the death rate in prison is 1/4 the general population. This is not surprising. Prisoners eat a controlled diet, they don’t drive, they have limited exposure to occupational hazards, etc.

All causes mortality rate in US prisons is higher than Germany or France, but comparable to Sweden and Switzerland at around 27.5 per 10,000 (note difference in denominator). http://www.statewatch.org/news/2017/apr/coe-annual-prison-st... (table 13)