With so many so willing to die in its name, why have citizens in many western countries been willing to surrender their hard-won freedoms with barely more than a squeak? Usually it’s fear. And fear can come in many forms: sometimes it comes down to the fear of not having a paycheque. As long as the trains run on time and you yourself are employed, why make a fuss if a few people here and there are being strung up by their thumbs?

And by the time the thumb-stringing really gets going, fear of another kind sets in. You can protect your thumbs only by staying below the surface of the frog pond: don’t stick your head up or croak too loudly, and, you are assured, as long as you don’t do anything ‘wrong’ – a shifting category – nothing bad will happen to you.

Until it does.

And since the free press will already have been suppressed, and since any independent judiciary will already have been dismantled, and since any independent writers, singers and artists will already have been squashed, there will be no one left to defend you. If there’s one thing we ought to know by now, it’s that absolutist systems with no accountability and no checks and balances generate monstrous abuses of power. That seems to be an infallible rule.

BUT ALL OF that may seem a little old-fashioned. It harks back to the mid-20th century, with its brutalism, its strutting dictators, its mass military spectacles, its crude in-your-face uniforms. The citizen-control methods of modern western governments are much more low-profile: less jackboot than gumboot. Our leaders are applying the methods of agribusiness cattle-raising to us: ear-tag, barcode, number, sort, record. And cull, of course.

That’s where the prison system comes in: shorn of its short-lived idealism – no longer a reformatory where criminals are to be reformed, no longer a penitentiary where they are to repent – it has become a warehouse where people are stashed. In its for-profit mode, it has also become a gizmo for creating more criminals, all the better to fill its available slots and extract money from taxpayers to foot the bill for it.

In the US, young black men are disproportionately represented in the prison population; in Canada, it’s young First Nations men. Are we incapable of thinking up anything more effective, and at the same time less costly, such as better education and better job creation? But maybe it serves the powers that be to foster the conditions that create scary people and have them running around, so we ourselves will see the logic of paying to lock them up.