Torture in "Civilized" Society

In Michael Foucault "Discipline and Punishment" various forms of torture from physical to psychological are given in gruesome and raw detail, but the truest and most frightening thing is that all forms of such barbaric atrocity were condoned by a society that for the most part was and still is in historical hindsight viewed as civilized. The executioner in Damian's story "The Body of the Condemned" is  painted as a poor person caught in the middle, forced to do this job because he has no choice, until the knowledge is given that he wished to keep a lock of Damian's hair as a souvenir which he is denied due to his poor performance in not giving Damian a quick death. This paints the executioner and even the preachers whose function is to hear Damian's confession of guilt as even worse than Damian in that by putting a human being, even someone who did or tried to do a heinous crime through such a horrendous series of tortures, they are putting themselves on a moral level as less than human. This can be also brought into play in the medieval practice of making a convicted person be brought before the town to be mocked and ridiculed before their death sentence was carried out, which is the focus of The Spectacle of the Scaffold, this idea of watching a person die and have it be a sick form of personal entertainment hasn't gone away even in 2013 where excessively violent media is put out for public consumption is condoned and even considered psychologically healthy as a way to purge are violent impulses. With that in mind does that make us any more civilized now than those older "civilized" societies?