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This was one of the really interesting plot elements in World War Z, where towards the end of the war where they couldn’t really afford to be wasting resources on prisons, they brought back corporal and public punishment. They’d put people in stockades to let the entire community know they were caught doing something like stealing their neighbor’s firewood, or publicly lashing executives who were war-profiteering, and only imprisoning the absolute worst offenders who were incapable of integrating back into society.
For a silly zombie novel, it honestly has a phenomenal amount of prettt interesting social commentary, and is absolutely worth a listen to the unabridged audiobook.
Read Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and you’ll definitely understand the obsession with purity. It was about as regulated as “100% natural” is these days, but at least meant that your “100% pure beef” was less likely to be cut with sawdust or rat meat or something.