It doesn’t have to be a steel cube.

You can tell how humane a society is by how it treats it’s criminals, and–importantly–how they treat criminals is how they’ll treat their citizens if given half the chance.

Not for no reason does the US lead the western world in state-sponsored brutality and casual administrative cruelty, while northern Europe (who locks their irredeemable criminals away in what Americans derisively refer to as “luxury hotels”) leads the world in happiness quotients.