One of dozens of reasons not to be a liberal is that liberals have a casual toward crime. The best writer on this topic that I know of is Theodore Dalrymple. His latest is Leniency and Its Costs. Get thee hence!
I feel sorry about the decline of the mother country, but I'm glad that the consequences of liberalism are playing out there more quickly and dramatically than here, so that we Americans may learn something before it is too late. Excerpt:
What, you might ask, was such a man doing at liberty? Well, most importantly, he was providing a living for the lawyers who defended him when he was caught: he was what one might call a criminal Keynesian. And he was providing ammunition for penological liberals who argue that prison doesn’t work. After all, he had been to prison and still he set fire to the furniture store, endangering the lives of so many people! On this argument, of course, he shouldn’t be sent to prison even now, for it will not “cure” him of his “disease,” and he will learn nothing from it. Among the penological liberals, alas, are to be counted more than one chief justice and our current minister of justice (an Orwellian term unknown to British government until that of Prime Minister Blair): the consistently careerist Kenneth Clarke, who values his reputation with the Guardian, our principal liberal newspaper, more than he does the lives and property of the people of Croydon.