> It's the protestant puritan spirit. It could be that, or a 1000 other things. Not one debate about historical causality has ever been settled in web comments

> It's the protestant puritan spirit. It could be that, or a 1000 other things. Not one debate about historical causality has ever been settled in web comments. However, in a society primarily organised around inculcating greed (brought about by another set of complex historical causes), I'd propose highly-profitable privatised incarceration as an a priori plausible candidate for a causal factor.