Just another American holding up a book they've never read and screaming lines they've been fed by a think-tank about it.
"Some years ago several pious individuals undertook to meliorate the condition of the prisons. The public was excited by the statements which they put forward, and the regeneration of criminals became a very popular undertaking. New prisons were built; and for the first time, the idea of reforming as well as of punishing the delinquent, formed a part of prison discipline. But this happy alteration, in which the public had taken so hearty an interest, and which the exertions of the citizens had irresistibly accelerated, could not be completed in a moment. While the new penitentiaries were being erected (and it was the pleasure of the majority they should be terminated with all possible celerity), the old prisons existed, which still contained a great number of offenders. These jails became more unwholesome and more corrupt in proportion as the new establishments were beautified and improved, forming a contrast which may readily be understood. The majority was so eagerly employed in founding the new prisons, that those which already existed, were forgotten; and as the general attention was diverted to a novel object, the care which had hitherto been bestowed upon the others ceased. The salutary regulations of discipline were first relaxed, and afterward broken; so that in the immediate neighbourhood of a prison, which bore witness to the mild and enlightened spirit of our time, dungeons might be met with, which reminded the visiter of the barbarity of the middle ages."
Tocqueville, unlike the newly minted class of college-educated illiterates who would come to throw him back and forth at each other while throwing in English words they learned upon encountering their foreign equivalents on Duolingo, each smearing a little bit more of their unwiped fecality from fingernail to spine of the $38 Barnes-and-Noble hardcover reprint of a public domain translation, was complicated, and the phenomenon he described, Democracy in America, remains complicated.