Abolish The Criminal Justice System

Frederic Bastiat made a telling comment on the socialist demagogues of his time, who were forever making extravagant promises to the proletariat. He said that The State has two hands. One, a gentle hand that gives away. Our The State is always publicly displaying this hand - all its welfare schemes for the poor. Bastiat asked his readers to look instead at the other hand, the one The State always tries to hide, the "harsh hand," the hand that takes away. He was referring then to the tax collectors of France, a sub-human species that was multiplying beyond belief in order to fund the "false philanthropy" of The State's gentle hand. Indeed, the two expressions Bastiat used to describe Socialism - "legal plunder" and "false philanthropy" - ought to resonate in our benighted land.

[Note that the symbol of the CONgress is "The Hand"! Which hand, I wonder. This symbol accompanies this post.]

While Bastiat wrote about tax collectors as the "harsh hand," I would like to draw my reader's attention to our The State's harshest hand - the State Police. What are we to do about them? For decades now we have become fully aware of the fact that the criminal justice system in India does not work. And, as far as the State Police are concerned, they do not seem to offer any "protection" to the citizenry at all. Rather, they are a force of oppression, repression and brutality. They are "lawless" in the true sense of this word. What is the way out of this?

In a recent post on the laws in Merrie Olde England, I pointed out that among the Anglo-Saxon tribes of yore, right up to the Norman conquest, there was nothing at all called "criminal law." All "crimes" were Torts; that is, they were all "crimes against the individual." So, if you hurt someone or his Property, you were hauled to court for a public trial and, if you were found guilty as charged, you had to pay hard cash to the person whom you had injured. This was Justice for the "victim." Further, the injured party was free to collect his own evidence and prosecute his own case.

The Anglo-Saxons had petitioned William, the Norman Conqueror, asking for "no changes in their laws" - but these foreign kings did change things. Their first move was to declare certain acts as "crimes against the King." And their motive was pure greed: they wanted to collect the fines for themselves. It is this greed that began a very unhealthy trend: the King then had to employ his own prosecutors; and, because ordinary people would not co-operate to apprehend those who had offended the monarch, the King also had to employ agents to do the needful. In the process, over the years, the "natural order" that existed among the Anglo-Saxons broke down and an entirely new branch of "criminal law," along with a huge "criminal justice system" came into being. Today, it is The State that employs policemen to enforce its Legislations (all "crimes against the King"); The State employs "public prosecutors"; The State employs jailers and hangmen to punish the guilty - and the VICTIM gets nothing! So, the fine sense of Justice that has always been the hallmark of the Anglo-Saxons has disappeared. The natural order has completely broken down. There is widespread disrespect for the Law. In short - there is injustice as well as social disorder.

Let us pause for a moment to consider all the various "crimes against the King" that modern society, all over the world, is confronted with, and which this King enforces with the armed might of his goons, the police. How is the King in any way disturbed if we smoke joints, if we gamble, or if sexual services are bought and sold by "consenting adults"? Treason, counterfeiting, armed insurrection - well, these should rightly upset a king. But surely the "sovereign parliaments" of our modern, democratic age are overstepping their limits. And The Law has become exactly what Bastiat exclaimed it was:

The law is no longer the refuge of the oppressed, but the arm of the oppressor! The law is no longer a shield, but a sword! The law no longer holds a balance in its august hands, but false weights and false keys! And you want society to be well ordered!

But England is still England; and India is India. Here, for months now, The People have been throwing stones at cops in Kashmir, and the cops have been retaliating with bullets. Over 60 people, very young people, have already died. In other parts of the vast territory, things are not much better. In West Bengal, in Chattisgarh, in Jharkhand, in Manipur - in all these places, there is an openly declared civil war being fought daily between the people and the cops. And the cops are losing. Even if they possess military might, they lack resolve, and their foot-soldiers are all lacking in motivation. In other words, The State has completely lost all "legitimacy."

Quite frankly, I think there is no solution other than to abolish the entire criminal justice system and revert to the one that prevailed among the Anglo-Saxons of yore, which I have just described in brief. If you wish to read more of my views on this important subject, there is a chapter devoted to this is my new book Natural Order: Essays Exploring Civil Government & the Rule of Law, which you can read online by clicking here.