Yes, indeed, there's a huge prison population here in America - more than anywhere else in the world. This is closely tied to the imbalanced sentencing of minorities to whites and the prisons for profit that encourage such sentencing, and in my mind is a huge violation of human rights.

"The United States is experiencing a major human tragedy. We have more people in jail than any other country on earth, including Communist China, an authoritarian country four times our size. The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate about a quarter of its prisoners — some 2.2 million people."
Bernie Sanders

"CCA has made profits from, and at times contributed to, the expansion of tough-on-crime and anti-immigrant policies that have driven prison expansion. Now a multi-billion dollar corporation, CCA manages more than 65 correctional and detention facilities with a capacity of more than 90,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia. The company’s revenue in 2012 exceeded more than $1.7 billion."
from "Just Like Selling Hamburgers," by Matt Straub (found in Forbes online)