For over half a century, violent crime has been rising in this country, while the penalties for it have been falling. These two trends throw current sentencing practices into the spotlight of public policy concern. Charles Murray deplores the recent trend away from custodial sentences in favour of less punitive alternative responses to crime. He argues that criminal offenders deserve penalties of which the degree of severity better matches the seriousness of their crimes.
Charles Alan Murray is an American libertarian conservative political scientist, author, and columnist. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (1984), which discussed the American welfare system, was widely read and discussed, and influenced subsequent government policy. He became well-known for his controversial book The Bell Curve (1994), written with Richard Herrnstein, in which he argues that intelligence is a better predictor than parental socio-economic status or education level of many individual outcomes including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, and crime, and that social welfare programs and education efforts to improve social outcomes for the disadvantaged are largely wasted.