After many attempts to find a journal interested in running a book review on this text, I have decided to post it here and on Amazon instead. The main reasons for the difficulty in finding a journal were as follows:

1. Scholarly journals rarely accept unsolicited book reviews.
2. This text has more to offer to a sociology and or criminology audience than it does to an economics one. My familiarity with these journals is small but growing, as I did find a few that had already ran a recent review by the time I contacted them. Which leads me to beleive…
3. Books must be reviewed recently after their publication. Or have lasting contribution to warrant being re-addressed.
None the less I think the book is worth reading and an important piece of the broader economics of prisons research agenda.

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This material, printed under the subheading PRISONS was taken from:
“Thinking Practically About Crime,” by James Q. Wilson, contained in the preface of Assessing the Criminal: Restitution, Retribution and the Legal Process, edited by: Randy E. Barnett and John Hagel III.

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I’ve been trying to write a survey of the literature on libertarian punishment theory. This body of work overlaps to a large degree with the anarchy v. state literature. Each typical justification for the state or some specific state-operated mechanism of justice (police, courts, production of law, prisons, etc.) shares a similar structure. They begin by making reference to the harsh conditions of the state of nature. Then they imlpy a superior social condition achieved by means of the institution in question, and conclude with a normative justification for the institution’s creation and maintenance. In other words, everyone benefits by living in a society protected by the institution of punishment, therefore a victim or an enforcer is legitimized to punish the guilty becasue even the guilty has the benefit of such protection.

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This excerpt was taken from Pursuing Justice in a Free Society Part II: Crime Prevention and the Legal Order by Randy Barnett. The full article is available at Professor Barnett’s homepage.
Pursuing Justice in the Free Society Part I: Power v. Liberty
Part II: Crime Prevention and the Legal Order

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I was recently directed to Herbert Spencer’s “Essays” as a source on prison ethics and libertarian punishment theory. I was specifically looking for something along the lines that, libertarians lack a theory of punishment but do possess a theory of restitution. I didn’t find such a quote explicitly though I beleive the claim to be true and the publication to be in agreement to it. The entire relevant section is contained in the extended entry of this post.

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I just read this story linked by Lew Rockwell.com, about California police shootings. The article mentions that a number of California police districts have had soiled pasts of deadly shootings and they commonly complain of low budgets and an innability to afford non deadly force technologies such as stun guns, pepper spray, and rubber bullets.

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I’ve recently been reading David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylym: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Rothman links the development of American penitentiaries with the development of insane asylums because both institutions possess an intentional core of rehabilitation. Thus, Rothman’s story centers around the ideological transition from Puritan punishment practices to reformatory rehabilitation.

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