I can't help but to add a counterpoint here for the United States. The incarceration rate in the United States is over five times that of China (although these numbers exclude prisoners in US Territories, military facilities, immigration and customs, facilities controlled by the Marshall's Service, and juvenile facilities, which would further increase the ratio). In fact, of first world nations, the United States leads every other nation for incarceration rate including Cuba, Russia, Rwanda, Belarus, and Iran.

Besides controversies related to race, America has also seen a large number of prison scandals in the past few years including:

1: kickbacks to the judicial system to pipeline truly innocent children into juvenile detention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal)

2: the forced, uninformed and/or coerced sterilization of prisoners (https://www.google.com/?q=california+forced+sterilization+of...)

3: documented overuse of solitary confinement (http://americamagazine.org/issue/solitary-scandal) in some cases for 40 straight years (http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/24/longest_serving_us_pr...)

4: a lack of legal opportunity in high density prisons for a speedy trial, even in the case of child offenders (http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/1/accused_of_stealing_a_...) and for those with mental issues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_DeFriest)

5: the premeditated use of penal labor as a cheap replacement for unskilled labor (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/prison-labor_n_2272...)

6: the use of untested, classified and ineffective lethal injections on death row inmates (for example that of Joseph Wood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Joseph_Wood)

However, the United States is not nearly as bad to journalists. If you are a foreign journalist in the US that is not liked you will be deported (Ibrahim Jassam, Jason Rezaian and Yeganeh Salehi) and/or harassed during travel (Laura Poitras) and if you are a domestic journalistic enterprise you may be surveilled (like the Associated Press surveillance scandal this administration, or the countless others from recent times). You may be aggressively prosecuted to reveal sources (ruining your ability to keep secrecy of sources and therefore trustworthiness to confidential informants) a la Risen. You may be pressured into not running certain stories (like The Washinton Post's 2004 story about the NSA mass surveillance that was pushed under the radar). You may lose access to officials or be blocked from attending or asking questions at press releases or in the converse be given access to these things for running certain stories or positive slants on them (Judith Miller, Ken Dilanian). You may be threatened with the Espionage Act for handing national documents (Glenn Greenwald). But you will probably not be directly imprisoned.