Tony Platt

Intellectuals for Law and Order

Crime will always remain with us, just as fires will be with us, or weeds … Those less favored by nature or society are more tempted to violate laws and therefore suffer punishment for doing so more often … There has been a worldwide decline in punishment and therefore of respect of law.1 When Ernest van den Haag’s Punishing Criminals (quoted above) appeared in 1975, it was regarded as a criminological aberration, a radical departure from the prevailing liberal consensus.2 Filled with factual and methodological errors, a curious stylistic mixture of old-fashioned Reader’s Digest moralism and literary pretensions, Punishing Criminals advocates the death penalty, longer sentences, ‘post-punishment incapacitation’, banishment, exile, house arrest and other less imaginative weapons in the ‘war against crime’.