Bastille

Today is Bastille Day in France. a commemoration of the fall of the Bastille de Saint-Antoine to revolutionaries on July 14, 1789, the year the United States Constitution went into effect. The original Bastille, started in the mid-14th century, no longer exists. However, its descendants do. It was the high-end Guantanamo of its day. A political prison for religious dissidents during the Reformation. A prison for high-born dissenters of all stripes over the ages.

We  in the U.S. should look seriously at the Bastille's history. We have the highest prison population per capita in the world. Why? Our politicians are currently waging a global Crusade of Fundamentalist Capitalism. They are currently waging a domestic war against petty drug users while having questionable relationships with those magnates who supply drugs to American streets from Afghanistan to Mexico. 

The Bastille still towers all across America. The private prison industry has built a Bastille Empire for profit. How long will it take for that Bastille Empire to succumb to the same fate as its Medieval prototype? How many people can be imprisoned in any society before the population, enraged by perverted justice, rises up in numbers to tear the system down?