Making crime cost.(CULTURE AND SOCIETY)(Charles Murray's work on civil procedure in United Kingdom)

Charles Murray, "Simple Justice," Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society in association with The Sunday Times, June 27, 2005 (civitas.org.uk)

AEI scholar Charles Murray has for many years paid visits to the United Kingdom under the auspices of The Sunday Times to assess what the world can learn from Britain's seemingly unstoppable crime problem. In January 2004, he wrote two essays for the paper suggesting that modern approaches to justice had lost sight of the punitive object of justice. The British think tank Civitas has republished these essays together with a new series of commentaries on them from experts on the left and right.

Murray's thesis is that sentences without a punitive element, such as approaches that leave the perpetrator free, mean that criminals are treated more leniently than they deserve. "Members of the public live in a world where civic life in their own neighborhoods is deteriorating, where they must spend inordinate time and money protecting their property, and where they fear going to places they didn't used to fear to go."

The remedy Murray proposes is to return to punitive, retributive conceptions of justice. He advocates drawing a distinction between citizens and outlaws, and proposes a system of more severe punishments for more serious offenses, where all evidence about an offender is made available at the trial, and where the trial judges are limited in how far they can deviate from the prescribed penalty. Murray points out that this was the system practiced in Britain until 1954, and it produced one of the most peaceful, law-abiding societies the world has ever seen.

Most of the commentators disagree with Murray's approach to some extent. ...