Thank you so much! The Penitents have two direct precursors. One is the Harrow in Kafka's In the Penal Colony--a chilling concept, and one from which a great deal of the law enforcement in the Craft Sequence draws in one way or another. Another occurs to me now as I type this--back around the time I started working on the Craft Sequence I ran into a comic called Time Management for Anarchists by Jim Munroe, which compares conventional industrial education to raising kids inside power armor, which grants them incredible physical strength but can also be used to electrocute them when they step out of line. That concept stuck with me: the exhilaration of power in compliance, punishment and weakness in defiance. I can see how the Penitents might have sprung from that seed.