Concept

Law and order (politics)

Overview

In modern politics, "law and order" is an approach focusing on harsher enforcement and penalties as ways to reduce crime. Penalties for perpetrators of disorder may include longer terms of imprisonment, mandatory sentencing, three-strikes laws and even capital punishment in some countries. Those who support the "Law and Order" movement would see harsh punishment as a deterrent for crime.

Despite the widespread popularity of "law and order" ideas and approaches between the 1960s to the 1980s exemplified by presidential candidates including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan running successfully on a "tough-on-crime" platform, statistics on crime showed a significant increase of crime throughout the 1970s and 1980s instead, and crime rates only began declining from the 1990s onwards. To differing extents, crime has also been a prominent issue in Canadian, British, Australian, South African, French, German, and New Zealand politics.

Opponents of the "law and order" movement make the argument that harsh punishment is unsuccessful in deterring crime, is unequally applied to disadvantaged groups, and does not address underlying or systemic causes of crime. They furthermore credit it with facilitating greater militarisation of police and contributing to mass incarceration in the United States.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Law and order (politics) is discussed.

Society cannot exist without law and order, and cannot advance except through the initiative of vigorous innovators. Yet law and order are always hostile to innovations, and innovators are almost always, to some extent, anarchists. Those whose minds are dominated by fear of a relapse towards barbarism will emphasize the importance of law and order, while those who are inspired by the hope of an advance towards…
Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
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If he had mind, he would have no need of law; for mind is the perfection of law. But such a freeman, 'whom the truth makes free,' is hardly to be found; and therefore law and order are necessary, which are the second-best, and they regulate things as they exist in part only, but cannot take in the whole. For actions have innumerable characteristics, which must be partly determined by the law and partly left to the…
Plato, Laws
states what it is; names the idea
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Upon some occasions, indeed, we both punish and approve of punishment, merely from a view to the general interest of society, which, we imagine, cannot otherwise be secured. Of this kind are all the punishments inflicted for breaches of what is called either civil police, or military discipline. Such crimes do not immediately or directly hurt any particular person; but their remote consequences, it is supposed, do…
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
states what it is
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On the other hand, as no society is ever in complete equilibrium, this harmony will never be perfect and may often be widely departed from. In what is called a single community, if it reach a considerable bulk, there are (in other words) often a number of minor societies, more or less thwarting and modifying each other; and different observers, who belong in the main to one or other of these subordinate groups, may…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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The ruin of the empire of the Romans, and, along with it, the subversion of all law and order, which happened a few centuries afterwards, produced the entire neglect of that study of the connecting principles of nature, to which leisure and security can alone give occasion. After the fall of those great conquerors and civilizers of mankind, the empire of the Caliphs seems to have been the first state under which the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
opens on it; names the idea
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Conservatism.

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