[lazide]

Pre-birth control, there were usually more mouths to feed than food to feed them.

Modern machines and energy allow things to scale and be decoupled from human productivity enough it’s easy to forget - but it used to be, a hand not helping make food and helping it’s neighbors, was a hand hurting them. In real, concrete ways.

Back then, no one had the infrastructure or wealth to deal with putting a bunch of assholes in cages and feeding them regularly until they ‘behaved’. Usually anyway.

Hell, unless the cages were intentionally horrific, that would often be a step up on most folks day to day living conditions anyway.

So make an example, and make it a spectacle - and cheap. Hard to beat an execution on that front!