I was recently involuntarily held in a mental hospital where I went through prison like conditions (strip search, had to wear scrubs, was locked in a room outside certain times a day, stuff like that) and thankfully came out in one piece after 8 days of this crap. I was just wondering why we subject people to these conditions when they haven’t even committed a crime?
My honest answer is that we have dark impulses and instead of fully handling them, as a society we have just managed to channel them through institutions.
The idea of vulnerable people being tormented by jailers is attractive to the darkest parts of our souls, and we have disavowed those parts of ourselves and hence cannot acknowledge them in order to control them.
As a result our society manifests this sadism in many of its institutions for dealing with vulnerable people.