Oh yeah, it's odd. Those places are waking nightmares in broad daylight. It is funny in retrospect the insane crap that goes on in such institutions and is viewed as completely normal, though.

They might not have ever actually brought in secret police or the Spanish Inquisition (not that I'd have expected an inquisition over anything I was involved in, not even when I was stuck in it and believed the reactionary insanity was normal), but there was absolutely a "We'll ask the questions around here!" vibe in several of the many facilities I bounced around for those 12 years.

Oh, the stories I could tell of men and women who'd be better suited to working for a fascist state's surveillance apparatus than working for a primary school or for a church, screaming at me like I personally was responsible for anything from a lost pencil to the extinction of the dinosaurs. In fact, it's so unbelievable to people who don't get it, that it'd make a damn good Cold War action novel. At least if I ever finish writing that, I might be able to get something good out of that very long waking nightmare.