Welcome to

Let's roll, let's roll, never get their money but we've got our soul.

Welcome to Redacted Tonight.

This is the comedy show where Americans in America covering American news are called foreign agents.

If you grew up in the United States like I did, then you probably think prisons are a fact of life, right?

We just go through our day-to-day, assuming that half our population is hardened criminals.

And without prison, they'd be running everywhere, just breaking things and kicking squirrels in the face and pissing in your car window when you're out of stoplight.

We just assume prisons have been around forever.

Probably back in cavemen times, they had one of the caves walled off with

like sticks and vines and stuff, and they kept Blartho in there because, you know, he was

a real dickheads, he had to seal him off. But the truth is that large prisons were not

much of a thing in America or really anywhere in the world until the 1800s. And that's

the first fact in today's super awesome top 13 facts about U.S. prisons that will blow your mind

and make you rethink everything you know about prisons.

And this is probably too long for a title of a segment.

Number one is that the prisons are relatively new.

The earliest penitentiary in America was Walnut Street prison in Philadelphia, which opened in 1773.

And even in Europe before that time, sure, there were dungeons where they'd have, you know, one or two guys. They really hated sitting there for 40 years, living off termites too.

But there were no jails holding thousands or millions of people.

This means that in the history of humanity, locking large percentages of your population in a cage is a very new thing.

We lived hundreds of thousands of years without doing it, and somehow we got by.

So prisons are kind of like nuclear weapons and nipple clamps.

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