AN OLD TACTIC used by authoritarian governments is to recruit poorly educated, or just plain poor, young men who'd otherwise be adrift in life, give them authority and a badge, usually also a gun, and send them out as enforcers of regime rule. They're almost guaranteed to be obedient, loyal, and ruthless.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes this in a chapter in Volume I of his massive work about Soviet prison camps, Gulag Archipelago, "The Blue Caps." Here's an excerpt:
Their branch of service does not require them to be educated people of broad culture and broad views-- and they are not. Their branch of service does not require them to think logically-- and they do not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering-- and that is what they do and what they are. We who have passed through their hands feel suffocated when we think of that legion, which is stripped bare of universal human ideals.
Is this a parallel to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the United States now?
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