Well that's depressing. Thailand is not a country we should strive to emulate. They have their own mass incarceration problem (they rank 8th in the world), state executions, their own "war on drugs", lots of violent killings involving guns, high levels of corruption, forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial killings, and a horrible track record for human rights. Thailand is a mess and it's tragic that so much of the US can't do any better when it comes to locking citizens behind bars.

It isn't, but many places in the US are not as bad as it seems if we count the USA as a whole. Mississippi (and Louisiana and most of the south up to and including Texas and Florida) is just really bad.