Puritanism is still alive?

The other morning my dad and I were talking, when he said something I found particularly interesting:

"[Americans] seem to always want to throw someone in prison."

This immediately reminded me of the first chapter in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, when the narrator says, "The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison" (Hawthorne 41). Meaning--according to Hawthorne, at least--the Puritans believed punishment for crime should be harsh and necessary to rid people of their transgressions. So much so, that they plan to build one in a new colony before houses or even a church are built.

I thought this was very interesting because in today's time if someone even mutters the word "Puritan", everyone around that person curses the name and censors everything related to Puritanism. The Puritans got a bad rep for the Salem Witch Trials, so today, anything that is even remotely labeled as "Puritan" people tend to evade.

Yet, our (meaning Americans') behaviors are still very similar to those of the Puritans. We claim to have moved on and label ourselves as "modern", but are we Americans truly different from our strict predecessors? What do you think?

I agreed with my dad that Americans are quick to throw suspected criminals in prison. I've noticed how in big court cases, a lot of people just want to lock the defendant away at the first sign of them being guilty, often at the first accusation. Perhaps because it's quicker and easier. And there's proof--America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, without even having the highest population. 

Additionally, Americans haven't completely abandoned the belief of predestination. Not to say that they are right or wrong, but a lot of people continue to believe that their fates are left up to God or another celestial being.

Maybe we haven't actually changed from the Puritans at all, or as much as we'd like to think. Perhaps all those movements away from Puritanism were actually just shifts of one big cycle, and we're right back where we started.