Introduction

Summary

Leaving to one side for the moment the very interesting question whether it might ever be possible to restrain someone in order to control their antisocial behaviour without at the same time punishing them for what they have done, the question I want to consider in this book is why it is the case that so many people in society, even when they know the circumstances that may well be said to have caused someone to behave badly, do not merely wish to control the behaviour of dangerous and often damaged offenders, but actually want to punish them for what they have done. In particular, I want to know why some people who perhaps have themselves never been the victims of crime are really quite so harsh in their views on the question of punishment, and very unwilling as it seems to allow anything in mitigation, while other people who are sometimes the victims of terrible crimes are really quite so generous and forgiving. Where even only a large minority of people in society argue that prison conditions should be such as not merely to incapacitate the offender (which I will define here as conditions which would prevent the prisoners from committing further offences while they are in prison), but insist instead that the conditions in which prisoners are held must always be worse than those of anyone outside prison – the principle that is sometimes known as ‘least eligibility’ – we will be forced to reproduce the conditions over and over again which made the offender what they are today and hence, as Sir Thomas More said nearly five hundred years ago, we will continue to ‘makes thieves and then punish them’ for doing what, ‘from their youth they were ever like to do’.