Click here for an index of Book Summary . The author is James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and chairman of the Council of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. Many Americans worry that the moral order that once held the nation together has come unraveled. We all know that society helps shape our character, but most of us deny that society excuses it.
People ought to own up to what they do and accept the consequences of their actions.
High rates of crime, the prevalence of drug abuse, and the large number of fathers who desert children and women who bore them all support the popular belief that responsibility has given way to selfishness. Crime and Punishment Nowhere does the problem of personal responsibility seem greater than in the criminal law. The public worries that criminals are too often excused rather than punished or, if they are punished, that the sentence is too short when imposed and even shorter in practice. The public suspects that criminal trials, especially those involving murderers, have been hamstrung by the introduction of a range of implausible excuses. These range from the so-called Twinkie Defense, a claim of judgment impaired by the toxic effects of junk food, through claims of psychosexual abuse used by Erik and Lyle Menendez to produce a hung jury in their first trial, to arguments that a woman may castrate or shoot a brutal husband even though he is asleep.