„Gulags were for the rich only”

No, they were also for reactionaries and other criminals, it's literally just the name of the soviet prison bureau.

The gulag system was also way more humane than the modern prison system in the US.

Learning that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, worse than all AES countries, was the first crack in my liberal programming. It has 1/8 ^th of all prisoners in the world. Just. Fuck.
- This is why one of the first books I always recommend to new leftists is Blood In My Eye. The US prison system is one of seral focal points for revolutionary organizing. Almost everyone knows someone who went to prison.

In its time the soviet reform to the tsarist gulags was actually regarded as a major step for restorative justice.

Some people just need to breaking rocks for a while, until they re-learn how to be human.

Critiques of incarceration and state authority in socialist states always conveniently ignores any comparisons to the system prior to the revolution (see: Cuba and Bautista).
- Quite a while back when I was still in school there was an anniversary and former members of our school attended. With a doctor I sat together at the table and he was talking about Cuba, where he was via a Christian organization to do some hospital work. He was telling me about the appalling poverty in equipment while the people, doctors and nurses alike, were well education. He was arguing that that was a failure of communism (we are talking about the late 1960s/early 1970s here, I am not quite sure anymore), ignoring that even at that point the life expectancy of Cubans did rose steadily compared to Batista - including for groups which had quite a few troubles before.
  
  On February 3, 1962, President John F. Kennedy imposed the U.S. embargo on Cuba.
  
  So less than 20 years after the revolution and up to 10 years into a blockade by the Western hegemon he was angry that Cuba wasn't having as good equipment as Western Germany did. We have plenty of capitalist states during that time which were much worse, including in equipment, even without a blockade.

Because no liberal revolutions ever chopped off any noble heads, nope nope nope. “capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” - some German guy with a beard that wrote about economics.