It's interesting to see reddit's America-hatred spread here. We can't condemn atrocities anywhere in the world without first holding America up as a paragon of all that is evil. The failure to recognize the good in America, indeed the many ways in which it still leads the world, and see the difference between a free country with perhaps too-strict sentencing guidelines and one which enslaves and kills its people for…
In general, Europe has some of the best prisons, and some of the worst prisons. France, Italy, Turkey, and Russia have horrendous prisons where in many cases prisoners don't survive their sentences. France's prisons are so historically bad that they've spawned whole revolutions numerous times, and are a common factor in their history. The EU was supposed to improve these conditions but it remains to be seen given they have very little data on how they're run, let alone anything publicly accessible.
In Asia only Japan has decent well run prisons, but their prisons are harsh while still having a high success rate. In the rest of Asia prisons are typically horrible, and even S.Korea has some awful conditions. Last thing I read said they don't feed prisoners and keep them in tiny huts, requiring their relatives to come and feed them. Burma is a massive police state with actual slaves by law.
In Africa, if you remove countries that just don't even have working governments, you find the prisons are also horrible, with the exception of maybe South Africa, but even they've had a history of nasty evil and torture (read about Steve Biko). It's improved a lot, but not nearly as much as it should.
The US is similar to Europe, with some of the worst and some of the best prisons in the world. Now, we're not talking about American legal policy on things like wrongful imprisonment by the LA Crash unit, idiotic "3-strikes your out" laws, or minimum sentencing laws. I'm talking the actual conditions of the prisons in the US as labeled by organizations like Amnesty International. In our case, prisons are generally alright, with a few standout offenses like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in AZ, and most prisons in the south and California. The worst state is definitely California, which makes sense given they've had more complete city wide riots than any other state in the nation and their huge gap between rich and poor.
But, a significant difference between our prison system and many others around the world (even those in Europe) are our laws about open records on how they're run and our recent trend of civilian oversight groups and recitivism prevention. Starting in about 2004 there's been a huge push to increase monitoring of prisons, offenses, guard abuses, and to help parolees stay out of jail. I personally worked on systems that tracked guard abuses at Riker's Island and the NYC DOC, as well as finger print systems for prisons that do early release programs and job release programs.
The biggest problem in American prisons is the advocacy by law enforcement of inmate-on-inmate rape as a sanctioned form of punishment. There's been numerous cases of countries refusing to extradite criminals based purely on our joke that a man will get ass raped in prison. If you wanted to focus your activism and hatred on any one thing to improve our system, it would definitely be eliminating rape.
In general, through my research and my own need to improve prisons, I found that prisons are horrible poorly managed hell holes everywhere. They generally reflect the cultural fear of the dominant members of a region against the "unclean" citizens, outsiders, and the low class. The difference between American prisons and this one in N.Korea is the size of it and the blatant attempt to keep it secret from the rest of the world. Very few countries in the world try to hide prisons, and when they do it's considered horrible, but none of them are hiding a prison that's the size of Manhattan: