It's easy to believe because the US is very good at commercializing and entrenching perverse profit motives, i.e. prison industrial complex and the US health se

It's easy to believe because the US is very good at commercializing and entrenching perverse profit motives, i.e. prison industrial complex and the US health sector knows how to extract more from bodies. The US was also rich/socially broken enough where locking up more people made political and economical sense (for some) and had decades of head start refining the process. Take PRC, Western estimates of Uyghur internment at 1/12 of population, or about lifetime internment of US blacks. Vast majority of mass internment was measured in months because they had to process prisoners through limited new facilities over a short period of time - the point was to filter problematic populations and find edge cases who were slapped with 10-20 year sentences. Majority was was released after a short stint. There's limit on how much country that intern on politics can extract value from industrializing prison, because they prefer not to have # dissidents get out of hand in the first place. Even coerced labour or organ harvesting is lame profit driver compared to the service jobs as a result of the US prison sector that benefits from countries having too much money. Most countries, especially developing countries, diverting people to lockup people is not productive use of resources, at least not for assembling widgets. PRC doesn't have the incentives to spend resources to lock up as large % of the population as the US in both scale and timelines involved. They spent trillions upfront to process the region so long term securitization doesn't involve expensive internment. Meanwhile, in the US, mass internment has become profitable, so it should not be surprising that US ends up imprisoning disproportionately more.