In my opinion, you're directionally right about the United States' penal system. Maybe prisoners in the United States can refuse work, and refusing work won't g

In my opinion, you're directionally right about the United States' penal system. Maybe prisoners in the United States can refuse work, and refusing work won't get them shot, but yes - the United States' penal system is most certainly a god-awful mess, and I say this from the depths of my conservative right-wing heart. That being said, there's a certain type of dishonest argument called a tu quoque - pointing at hypocrisy. It's often used to derail criticism of some terrible thing by saying 'oh, hey, you do it too', diverting the discussion to a debate about that. With regards to the Soviet Union, the tu quoque has a special history, because they used it incredibly consistently throughout their history. The phrase 'А у вас негров линчуют' - roughly, 'but in your country, they lynch black people' - was used so often by Soviet politicians it became the punchline to popular jokes about food shortages and human rights violations. That's probably why you were being downvoted - because, completely aside from the rightness or wrongness of your statement, comparison of the happily-gone Soviet Union to the current United States was seen as an attempt to move the conversation away from the awfulness of the Soviet Union's forced labor programs and these slaves' desire to communicate with future generations.