One for the road

I just finished “Democracy in America,” which is a book by a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville on… well, it’s in the title.

To write this book, Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont, who was the Dr. Watson of the duo, only without a mustache, sailed to the United States to check out its capital attractions.

Not McDonald’s. Prisons.

These two splendid gents got the French government to sponsor their jaunt across the Atlantic by promising they’d bring back loads of stuff on prisons. Wouldn’t you know, the ploy worked.

But this is not a story about prisons, or getting the American go...