Uh. Friend. I hate to tell you this, but the US imprisons more people per capital than the Soviet GULAG system at its height. China has never imprisoned people at the rate the USA has. Even in the last 18 months, where the USA dropped out of the top slot in the world, it lost to Cuba who recently had a huge uptick in incarceration due to the US's most recent attempts at recruiting dissidents. And the USA is only slightly better than Cuba on this number. And Cuban prisons are like, fully integrated into communities and don't rely on torture and don't have gang violence and don't charge prisoners hundreds of dollars a day and don't use them as slave labor the way the US does.

No. On this particular issue of locking up whomever they want for whatever reason and abusing them and letting them die and massive recidivism and a parole population that is under 24/7 surveillance that is something like 2x larger than the prison population - on this topic, the US is not somehow sliding towards being problematic. It has been this way for a century. The US is a brutal brutal regime to its own people.