July 19, 2026

HMMM:

I would think ideology plays a far greater role than gender. In his 2001 book, Volume One of The Age of Reagan, Steve Hayward wrote that by the early to mid-1960s:

The deterioration in criminal justice was not limited merely to catching criminals; punishment also began to slip. Even as crime was rising sharply, the number of criminals in prison was falling, and average time-served was declining. Punishment was out; “rehabilitation” was in. The public went along with this—for a while. In July 1966, a Gallup Poll found for the first time a larger number of Americans opposed the death penalty, by a 47 to 42 percent margin. This did not last long, however, and as crime rose, support for the death penalty soared back to 67 percent by 1976, peaking at 79 percent in September 1988.

In the face of this obvious deterioration in the criminal justice system, liberals decided to blame—society. Johnson had appointed a President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, which reported to the American people in February 1967 that neither law enforcement nor the administration of justice could do very much by themselves to stem rising crime. “The underlying problems are ones that the criminal justice system can do little about,” the Commission said. “Unless society does take concerted action to change the general conditions and attitudes that are associated with crime, no improvement in law enforcement and administration of justice, the subjects this Commission was specifically asked to study, will be of much avail.”

The Commission’s report became a collateral endorsement for enlarging the Great Society: “Warring on poverty, inadequate housing and unemployment, is warring on crime. A civil rights law is a law against crime. Money for schools is money against crime. Medical, psychiatric, and family-counseling services are services against crime.” The Commission endorsed, among other progressive measures, giving convicts furloughs to work in the community during daytime hours. The only measures the Commission didn’t endorse were the ones the public most strongly desired: money for police protection and more prisons. To the contrary, the Commission endorsed lenience toward criminals: “Above all, the Commission’s inquiries have convinced it that it is undesirable that offenders travel any further along the full course from arrest to charge to sentence to detention than is absolutely necessary for society’s protection and the offenders’ own welfare.”

Liberalism would be a generation recovering from this kind of thinking. Many poor urban neighborhoods have yet to recover, for it was precisely the poor, and largely black, populations of central cities who suffered most from this negligent criminology—the very constituency liberals thought they were advancing. Blacks were two and a half times more likely than whites to be victims of crime in 1966, and this gap would widen over the next decade as black victimization in the inner city soared. Charles Murray noted that “it was much more dangerous to be black in 1972 than it was in 1965, whereas it was not much more dangerous to be white.” By 1970, social scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded, a person living in a central city faced a higher risk of being murdered than a World War II soldier did of dying in combat. But when Richard Nixon and conservatives called for a return to “law and order,” the phrase was attacked as “a code phrase for racism.”

Whatever their gender, why should we expect Europe’s pandering leftist judges to be any softer on crime than ours historically have been?

UPDATE:

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll