All civilization rests upon the executioner. Despite ournfeelings of revulsion, “He is the horror and bond of humannassociation. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the worid,nand at that very moment, order gives way to chaos, thrones topple,nand society disappears.” Joseph de Maistre’s insight hasnalarmed most readers—among them not a few Catholic reactionaries—whonhave encountered it. There are, it hardly needsnto be said, more cheerful terms in which to define civilization,nsuch as the beauty of its arts, the morals of the people, thenstrength of its institutions, but in practical terms, Maistre’s pronouncementnwill work as well as any. Without law, without anfirm commitment to enforce justice by punishing malefactors,nno civilization, indeed no human culture, can be said to exist.nBut we can go further than this. In a very real sense we canndefine the qualities of a culture in terms of its punishments.nSome societies—the Japanese and many Amerindian tribes,nfor example—have exulted in torture as something delightfulnfor its own sake; in others (the Comanche) justice is the mlenof the strongest, and a weakling man without friends is powerlessnagainst a larger man; in 18th-century England, under theninfluence of Locke’s theories and the interests of the rising cap)italistnclass, crimes against property were more often capital thanncrimes against persons.nIn the modem United States our criminal justice system isna perfect metaphor for the whole of society. Crimes are regarded,ntoday, not as acts of injustice requiring retribution, but asnsocial problems to be addressed or the symptoms of a diseasen10/CHRONICLESnPERSPECTIVEnLaw and/or Ordernby Thomas Flemingnnn^Kr-.. ‘A Xn^,V-^– li V jf^NnI–‘*-nthat needs to be treated. The old concerns—the public’snsafety, the satisfaction of justice, recompense to the victim—nall are subordinated to the overriding concern of rehabilitation.nOurs is a society that increasingly assigns to government thenfundamental responsibility for rearing children, treating thensick, and healing the moral and mental ailments that lie at thenroot of alcoholism, dmg addiction, racial insensitivity, and crime.nThe state, on this understanding, is a vast therapeutic machinendesigned to reform the defective character of the people.nCriminals are only the most available class of Americans uponnwhich the state experiments, and the innovations tried uponndrug dealers, rapists, and murderers today will eventually benpracticed against social drinkers, uxorious husbands, and religiousnenthusiasts. At the center of all our institutional apparatusnare the warehouses and factories of coercion, in whichnhuman nature is reforged. The 19th-century poorhouses, thenearly 20th-century reform schools, and the contemporary gulagnof schools, prisons, and treatment centers are all devices creatednby modern European and American governments toncontrol and re-form the lives and characters of the unruly, thennonconformist, and the insubordinate.nIt is no accident that the eariiest advocates of prison reformnwere a coalition of Enlightenment philosophes and nonconformistnreligious eccentrics. John Howard, the conscience-torturednnonconformist who authored The State of the Prisons,nand the materialist utilitarian Jeremy Bentham disagreed onnalmost everything else under the sun, but on the need to reformn