It started in politics.
EDIT: Any issue relating to either military forces or criminal justice is rooted in the political context of the people involved and the people discussing them. On the internet (and on a board dedicated to RPing a setting derived from a show created to explore social and political issues) it's not going to be long before someone with a wildly divergent opinion, coming from a very different upbringing and offline daily cultural context is going to pop into the discussion.
This thread should've been booted to the subboard from post 1.
EDIT: That said, my difficulty is with the apparent belief that prison, for violent offenders, should be some sort of shiv-filled Thunderdome, wherein any inmate is given license to harm any other.