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."