If they put criminals in jail they wouldn't have to have a surveillance state like this.
I suspect that's actually due to an extremely bad false positive rate on the police and court system; jailing a lot of non-violent people for petty incidents and failing to address more serious crimes if they're even slightly hard to investigate.
The United States leads the world in total number of people incarcerated, with more than 2 million prisoners nationwide (per data released in October 2021 by World Prison Brief). This number is equivalent to roughly 25% of the world's total prison population and leads to an incarceration rate of 629 people per 100,000—the highest rate in the world.
...maybe it's time to try a different approach like maybe slowing the transfer of wealth to plutocrats and back to the lower and middle classes.
El Salvador passed us a couple years ago, but yea your post is right on the nose.
EDIT: only in per-capita.
Note that those are driven by the policies of the current government, I'm not saying that the Salvadoran government is bad _at all_, I'm saying that the 'imprison everything' part of the set of policies is probably the less effective one.
Also Salvador uses (and probably reinforce) non-salvadoran cartels to help destroy their local gangs, and I'm not sure that this works if every country does the same.