When I talk to people of a Stalinist bent they often argue that the accounts of the Gulags being essentially slave camps where people were worked to death in terrible conditions as being extremely overblown and primarily anti-communist propaganda, that there were few excess deaths associated with the gulags, that they had good standard of food, shelter and healthcare, that most of the people there were for actual crimes and not for not liking Stalin's mustache enough, and most importantly that when compared to other prison systems, including those of western democratic states, that they weren't really anything special and if anything were better off. The particularly mention chain gangs in America at the same time as an example of prison labour comparable if not worse than what Gulag inmates had to do, and also point towards the extremely high incarceration rate of modern America and the many issues that plague its prison system today in terms of violence, injustice and terrible conditions.
Is this fair, and have the Gulags gotten far too much focus when they weren't really much worse in terms of scope or conditions than prisons in the capitalist nations?
While more can always be said, especially since you asked a directly comparative perspective, you can try /u/restricteddata's answer here which discusses things like the bounty guards got for "foiling" escape attempts.
The Gulag was a massive prison system dedicated both to the extraction of labor value from its inmates, as well as having some ideological beliefs about the reformability of certain political classes. It was not an extermination system like the Nazis built, but the lives of political prisoners were considered pretty cheap, and the conditions of many of the camps were exceedingly harsh. As a result it had a very high mortality rate, and abuses by both guards and other inmates — murder, rape, torture — were quite common, if survivors' accounts, and the accounts of former guards and employees, are to be believed.
/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov has an additional answer which discusses things from the perspective of women.
Comparing different penitentiary systems is a very broad topic that is almost impossible to cover in the format of an article, it would require a large monograph. But as a first approximation, let us begin. Before the invention of antibiotics, epidemics were the main cause of death in all camps and prisons, including advanced countries. Dr. William Bailey says in his note that the almost universal cause of death in prisons was infectious disease, primarily tuberculosis. There he also gives statistics. For every 100 deaths in Philadelphia, 59 died of consumption, in Baltimore 61, in Boston 66. Among the free white population of New York the death rate from tuberculosis was 4.5%. He names three main causes.
Poor ventilation of the cells.
Cold or climate in general.
Inactivity of prisoners, in fact they move very little.
All of this can be safely attributed to the general problems of the penitentiary system of the world.
By the figures for the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century:
In Prussia the mortality rate was 31 per 1,000. In 1860-1870.
In Great Britain the best figures. 14-16 per 1,000, in 1890-1900. But there's a nuance. Actually this statistic only takes into account the metropolis, and we know that in reality prisoners were sent to colonies where conditions were much worse. And the main cause of death is prison ships, they are not counted here either. In hulk ship prisons the mortality rate could be as high as 25-40%.
France gives the worst figures of 40-60 per 1000 but the statistics for France are not accurate.
U.S.. In the U.S. there was a big difference between north and south not in favor of south.
North 14.5 per 1000,
South 41 per 1000
in 1900 - 1910.
This has to do with something gulag-like phenomenon called "leasing labor" 1865 - 1928 when the state rented out prisoners to big companies.Official start May 11, 1865 Governor Thomas Rugor of Georgia issued 100 African American prisoners to businessman Thomas Fort to work on the Georgia-Alabama railroad. In the worst situation were prisoners who were rented out to camps in the swamps of Texas at a death rate of up to 250 per 1,000. This compares or surpasses the darkest stories of the gulag, like the gold mines on the Kolyma. In the Kolburg mines the death rate was as high as 90 per 1,000.
Gulag mortality statistics can be seen here.
https://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/1009320
You can see that there are better and worse years, but 1933 gives the highest percentage. 153 per 1,000. And the war years of 1942 and 1943. 249 and 224 per 1,000. In these cases as you can see things are very bad only comparable to the prison ships or the work camps in the south of the USA.