Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics

Volume 2, No. 4 (Winter 1999)

To Serve and Protect is a breath of fresh air in the fog of mainstream recommendations concerning security, crime, and punishment. In the mainstream literature, liberals typically regard the offender as the victim of an egoistic society and conservatives typically say that the only way to reduce crime is to increase the severity of punishment. Benson brilliantly shows that the solution to the problem of criminal justice does not rest with increasing law-enforcement budgets or imposing harsher punishments, but with privatization.