Erheiternderweise finde ich in meinem RSS-Reader fast untereinander Zettels Artikel und einen Hinweis von Bruce Schneier auf einen Artikel über US-Gefängnisse.

Zitat

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... in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

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Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

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Gut, den Vergleich, dass momentan mehr Leute in US-Gefängnissen einsitzen als im GULag unter Stalin, den hätte sich der Autor sparen können... aber der Rest des Artikels ist lesenswert.

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Defender la civilización consiste, ante todo, en protegerla del entusiasmo del hombre. - Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito