People love to say that abolishing capital punishment was a moral victory. But look around—do things seem better? The streets are full of crime, and the courts are more interested in protecting criminals than punishing them. The truth is, we used to have a justice system that worked. It didn’t just scare people into behaving. It permanently removed the violent and the generally useless. For centuries, it drained the gene pool of unrestrained trash.
John H. Langbein’s Albion’s Fatal Flaws lays out how the English justice system of the 18th century was designed to maintain order. It wasn’t mindless slaughter; it was a system that kept a firm grip on society, punishing the right people at the right time. Judges, juries, and the Crown had discretion over who lived and who died. Sentencing laws were deliberately harsh, but that didn’t mean everyone convicted was executed. The option was always there, ensuring criminals knew the risk.
Peter Frost, in Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification, takes the argument further. He shows that the steady removal of violent criminals had a long-term effect. The homicide rate didn’t just fall because people were scared of the rope. Over generations, the worst offenders were simply eliminated. England’s population changed. Violent impulses became rarer. Civilisation strengthened.
Justice can be about fairness, or it can be about utility. The first approach—strongly supported by Dr Gabb—says that the courts should punish only the guilty and that making an example of them will deter others.
The second, which makes far more sense, is that the courts should not get lost in legal niceties but should focus on whether the accused is worth keeping. A man may be innocent of the specific crime he is charged with, but if he has the look of a habitual criminal, is it really a loss to society if he swings? Similarly, if a man is guilty but still useful—if he can be transported or put to work—why waste him on the gallows?
This was how English law once worked. The courts weren’t trying to balance the scales between criminal and victim. They were managing society. The law was a tool, not a moral exercise.
Frost’s research shows that from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, English courts were condemning between 0.5% and 1% of all men in each generation to death. At least as many died before trial or in prison. Over time, this had an effect.
The homicide rate in England dropped from around 30 per 100,000 in 1500 to about 3 per 100,000 by 1750. That’s a tenfold decrease. And it wasn’t just because people were scared. The most violent men simply weren’t around to pass on their traits. Crime didn’t just decline—it was bred out.
Langbein’s analysis of the 18th-century system shows why it worked. The law made death a constant possibility for criminals, but actual execution was selective. Judges and juries had enormous discretion. Sentences were severe, but they could be reduced. A thief might be hanged, or he might be transported. Sometimes, he might be pardoned. But habitual or violent criminals and the useless were almost always removed.
Now compare that to today. Capital punishment has been abolished. Life sentences are rare. Criminals no longer fear the consequences of their actions. Worse, they are allowed to multiply. In the past, the sort of people who terrorise the streets now wouldn’t have survived long enough to breed.
The 19th and early 20th centuries saw the slow collapse of the old system. First, transportation ended. Then, capital punishment was restricted. By the mid-20th century, it was gone entirely. Prisons replaced the gallows, but soon even long-term imprisonment was seen as too harsh. “Rehabilitation” became the goal.
The result is clear. The same sort of men who would have been hanged a few centuries ago are now living off benefits, stabbing each other in London, and laughing as the police let them go with a warning. If they do end up in prison, they’re out in a few years. And they go on to have children, ensuring that the next generation is just as bad, if not worse.
The solution is obvious. The death penalty needs to return, not just for murder but for repeat or violent criminals, and anyone who repeatedly proves that he cannot live in a civilised society.
The old system worked because it didn’t waste time debating whether a man could be reformed. It asked a simpler question: Do we want to keep him? If the answer was no, he was removed.
That’s how the English built a society where law was respected and crime was rare. That’s how they drained their country of the worst elements and kept order for centuries.
If Britain wants to survive, it has to remember how to do it again.
Citations
- John H. Langbein, Albion’s Fatal Flaws, Past and Present, Yale Law School, 1983.
- Peter Frost and Henry C. Harpending, Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification, Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2015.
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My first thought on reading this was that, even if the thesis is correct, a deliberate attempt at it wouldn’t work now because, since the 19th. century, we have had professional policing and criminal detection has had a scientific basis, which has understandably led to a concern for getting the right person rather than simply removing bad apples heedless of legal niceties. But on further reflection, you could make the argument that a sort of socially engineered justice still exists. The Left certainly like to make the case that it does and they also don’t object to inflicting some socially engineered justice of their own against any white working class people who step out of line. And Peter Lynch did die in prison.
Aside from that, I do see the flaw in the thesis, which is encapsulated by Blackstone’s ratio – an ancient bit of wisdom, a point that itself weakens your argument. I accept that Blackstone’s ratio need not necessarily contradict what you say, but Blackstone’s argument is essentially telling us that if guilty people form the view that legal proof of guilt need not matter, then where is the incentive for the innocent to behave?
I would also question the wisdom of genetic pacification, though the difficulty may be more in the turn of phrase than the substance. I should not want the state to pacify anybody unless that person actually is engaged in criminal deeds. The idea that the criminal justice system should be used as a tool of general genetic pacification seems dangerous and replete with unintended consequences and ramifications.
Furthermore, if this genetic pacification was so effective, why should it be necessary today? Why do white British people still commit violence if our ancestors were pacified at the genetic level? Why do we have an underclass amongst the white British people, living permanently on benefits? Surely genetic pacification should have precluded most or all of this?
Halcombe: “Justice can be about fairness, or it can be about utility.”
Justice serves a third function, as noted in Ernest Van den Haag’s 1983 book _The Death Penalty_: To provide an example that confirms the law-abiding in their virtue.
That incidental third function, however, has not been lost; it has merely been turned topsy-turvy. By letting off murderers and rapists with slight punishment and inflicting the letter of the law on middle-class whites, the law-abiding are kept cowed in fear. Thus lawfulness is deracinated from any natural law, commonsense confirmation of what is right, and rooted instead in state diktat.
[…] essay is an elaboration on the argument advanced by Marian Halcombe in her article Bring Back the Gallows: Crime, Eugenics and the Death of Justice. In her article, Mrs Halcombe suggests that the modern criminal justice system, by failing to […]