PRISON IS PRISON - BY ANY OTHER NAME
Idaho, as do most jurisdictions in the United States, refers to their state detention (prison) institutions as "Correctional" facilities, "Rehabilitation" and sometimes Pre-Release centers. These same institutions, in countries considered politically unfriendly to the US, are often referred to by American media and government spokespersons as "Gulags", "Internment", "Reeducation", even "Concentration" camps. Jails and prisons in countries aligned with the US government - though known to consistently violate basic human rights, like Mexico - are simply not discussed.
In a report aired May 24, 2022 on Idaho Public Television's WORLD channel, the German news program (DW) interviewed Adrian Zenz, an expert on China's Ethnic Policies regarding recently leaked photos of abuse of (ethnic minority) Uyghurs (pronounced "Wee-gers") held in an internment camp in central China. The photos, which were said to have been hacked from prison computer files containing data on a police training exercise, depicted guards and police inside a detention facility, many in tactical gear, armed with what appeared to be loaded firearms.
Although it's clear not all the photos stolen from the Chinese government server were aired on Idaho PBS, when one looks past the politically motivated propagandist reporting of the left-wing DW news, the armed guards in training, and the narrative of ethnic internment, the photos that were shown - presumably the worst of the worst - depict a clean, modern prison facility with medical areas and staff on site. Since the Chinese prison photos were not expected to be released or made available to the public, it is unlikely they were staged (as are most photos and videos used as stock images by television outlets when airing stories about Idaho prisons).
In almost every discussion about prisons in "unfriendly" nations, the dialogue is about "political" prisoners, though the official position in the US is that there are no political prisoners in American prisons - only criminals. Despite the dialogue, the same holds true in foreign lands, with those governments too claiming that only duly convicted criminals populate their prisons.
In the US however, the primary focus of prisons is not the incarceration of political prisoners (though certainly there are many), rather, it is money, as the warehousing, working and fleecing of prisoners (and their families) in this country is big business and generates billions of dollars each year for governments and private entities alike. Corporations such as CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), Geo Group and others operating for-profit "private" prisons, companies like Aramark and Trinity, among others provide vendor services for prisoner meals, and Securus, JPay and Keefe granted exclusive contracts to sell overpriced and under-quality goods and services (including telephone access) to prisoners.
Some state and federal prisons use inmate labor to make goods either for government use (from license plates to office furniture, to mattresses, etc) and/or to be sold on the open market - often in direct competition with private industry. Inmates are forced to toil in the hot sun, without pay, picking cotton, digging peanuts and other hard labor, while others are hired out to private companies to do all types of menial jobs. Inmates are used for telemarketing, bill collection, translating text into braille or performing other tasks for pennies an hour, while the governments and their private industry partners rake in the profits.
It's no wonder then that these companies spend millions, if not billions of dollars lobbying state and federal lawmakers (and contributing to their political campaigns) to enact laws that will result in more prisoners - being held longer - across this country. The more prisoners, the more tax dollars that can be funneled into the economy, and the better the economy, more money that can be made by the private interests, and the more money that can be made by the private interests, the more kickbacks that can be made to the government and prison officials who decide what companies can benefit from housing prisoners. A vicious circle.
While prisons - as a rule - are not going to be very nice places, and some are going to be worse than others, let's get our own prisons, gulags and dungeons cleaned up before we start wagging our fingers at others. Indeed, maybe if we look hard enough, we might actually learn something.