The story was told by an American student named Valerie Ruppel who had returned from a term's study in London. Two days after her group reached Britain, a policewoman came to South Kensington to brief them on how to keep themselves safe.

I pick up Valerie's account in her own words: "Her first question was to the women, 'How many of you brought Mace?' Three girls raised their hands. She told us we couldn't use it, shouldn't even carry it, it was illegal.

"Had any of us brought any other type of weapon, such as a knife? Several of the men in our group indicated that they carried pocket knives. She told us to leave them at home too."

"Then she instructed us on how to properly be a victim. If we were attacked, we were to assume a defensive posture, such as raising our hands to block an attack."

"The reason (and she spelt it out in no uncertain terms) was that if a witness saw the incident and we were to attempt to defend ourselves by fighting back, the witness would be unable to tell who the aggressor was. However, if we rolled up in a ball it would be quite clear who the victim was."

This is the police talking--the police, the ones who are supposed to line up on the side of the good guys. If Mace is illegal, why not tell the women what legal substances they could carry (pepper spray or perhaps a particularly irritating hairspray) and add helpfully, "It works best if you go for the eyes"?

Pocket knives are legal. Why tell the men to leave them at home? The truly puzzling advice was to roll up in a ball if attacked so that a witness could tell who the victim was. Are we to believe that when a man has been seen grappling with a woman in the street it's going be a problem for the police to determine who the aggressor was?

Most of all: why are police giving this kind of mealy-mouthed advice in a country supposed to be in the midst of a war on crime?

Following the British media at home in America, I knew that horror stories about violent crime are a staple of the press and that middle Britain's unhappiness about the police and courts is widespread.

I knew that Tony Blair came to office after a campaign in which "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" had been one of his most popular themes, and that he subsequently sent parliament a blizzard of proposals, more than 40 bills out of the Home Office in the past six years.

I knew that the government's rhetoric has been aggressive, with David Blunkett, the home secretary, sounding as ready to throw the book at criminals as Michael Howard ever was when he did Blunkett's job. And the police still want people to roll up in a ball if attacked?

It wasn't just Valerie Ruppel's story that made me wonder how much the behaviour of the British criminal justice system has actually changed.

When I first looked at Britain's crime problem for the Sunday Times in 1989, I was assured that the rise in crime was a statistical illusion and that the public was in a "moral panic" for no good reason.

Fifteen years later, I now read the government's upbeat emphasis on the drop in violent crime shown by the British Crime Survey, playing down the contradictory and continued increases in violent crime shown by police statistics.

And, yes, "moral panic" is still a favourite explanation of the public's continued concern about crime, now blamed on the tabloid press.

Meanwhile, everything I read about the people who run the criminal justice system indicates that they are waging guerrilla war against their political masters.

The newly appointed director of public prosecutions calls Blunkett's proposals for stricter sentencing policy "grotesque", and laments that the politicians pander to public opinion.

Sir David Ramsbotham, the retired chief inspector of prisons, publishes a book attacking the increased use of incarceration.

The Sentencing Advisory Panel, a Home Office committee operating independently of the home secretary, recommends community sentences for muggings that don't physically injure the victim.

Even the prime minister's wife, Cherie Booth QC, goes on record about the "urgent need" to find alternatives to prison.

The bench adds its considerable prestige to the battle against the government's reforms. Twenty lord justices of appeal gather to plot strategy for foiling the government's proposed changes to sentencing laws. Lord Ackner, a retired law lord, recommends that judges ignore sentencing guidelines even if they are passed. The nation's most senior judge, Lord Woolf, issues broadside after broadside against the rising prison population, the get-tough-on-crime mood, and the government's plans for the judiciary.

The prime minister and home secretary soldier on. "We've given you the powers," Blair tells a conference on antisocial behaviour. "It's time to use them."

Blunkett blasts magistrates for ignoring new guidelines, telling them that they need to "stop being social workers and start being enforcers of the law". But few charged with carrying out the policies seem to think there's a need for them, nor that they are good ideas in any case.

It is as if the criminal justice elites and the public live in different worlds.

The criminal justice elites--meaning the people who run the British police, court and prison systems--live in a world where the real problem is not crime but the government's destructive policies to deal with it.

The members of the public live in a world where civic life in their own neighbourhoods is deteriorating, they must spend inordinate time and money protecting their property, and they are fearful of going to places where they didn't used to fear to go.

Look at two recent developments: listeners to BBC Radio 4's Today programme have voted for a proposed law that would grant property owners immunity if they harmed burglars, while a judge in Reading has accepted a burglar's plea that he acted in self-defence when he "pushed" the policeman trying to arrest him. The officer suffered substantial facial injuries.

What's going on? The press accounts suggested to me that the public and criminal justice elites are divided by something more profound than disagreements about what works best.

The debate is not really about the comparative recidivism rates of different types of sentences, or whether the annual cost of a prison cell is too high, or whether police should be armed. What really divides the public from the elites, I surmised, are fundamentally different views about the morally right thing to do when dealing with crime--about the meaning of justice.

The public view seemed straightforward: the right thing to do is lock up the bad guys and protect the good guys. But the views of the people who are engaged in shaping the British debate about crime were less clear. When I came to Britain, I set out to explore them.

"Justice" is a big word. As an entry point for discussing it, I devised a set of hypothetical situations. Seven of these "hypotheticals" are shown in the accompanying questionnaire. Before reading any further, you might want to decide on your own answers (and please send in your answers by the internet or post).

One way to score your answers is to add up the numbers. The lower your score, the more liberal, compassionate or soft (depending on one's point of view) your conception of justice. The higher your score, the more tough-minded, punitive or reactionary (depending on one's point of view) your conception of justice.

The more revealing way to score your answer is to count the number of times you chose option Three--in other words, the number of times that you did not qualify your response, did not make room for exceptions, but saw a simple, unambiguous principle at issue.

To put it another way, to what extent do you think that justice depends on evaluating the complexities of each case? To what extent do you say to hell with the complexities, here are the rules, let's enforce them?

I will label people with the opposite points of view as the Progressives and the Cops.

For the Progressives, justice must deal with a range of behaviour in which we are all sinners of one sort or another. Who doesn't fiddle his income tax, or break traffic laws, they ask, or do something else for which he could be prosecuted and convicted if it were known?

People end up in the dock for myriad reasons, many of them beyond their control, say Progressives. The goal of the criminal justice system is to deal with the behaviour, not to punish it.

For an extreme Progressive, punishment is so irrelevant to justice that the first three hypotheticals are hard to answer. Should an offender with an advantaged background be punished more severely than one from a disadvantaged background?

You don't want to "punish" either one, says Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform. "Punishment doesn't heal the damage and help the victim, nor does it help transform the offender. What you get is more pain. By punishing the disadvantaged offender or the advantaged offender, you're just making things worse. You're increasing the world's experience of pain." Isn't there any value at all in linking bad behaviour to a punishing consequence? "Absolutely none." Things must be done to an offender, for his own good or for the community's, but punishment in itself has no purpose.

For a more moderate Progressive, punishment has a place, but a sentence has many other purposes too--rehabilitation, deterrence, a signal to the community, incapacitation. These vary from case to case; hence so should the sentence.

For Progressives, the right to self-defence is restricted to acts that are proportionate to the danger one is in, and one may certainly not take the law into one's own hands and punish an offender caught in the act. Indeed, preserving the offender's rights is a chief function of the judicial system, as important as preserving the victim's rights or, for that matter, as important as determining guilt or innocence. Admitting evidence of prior crimes prejudices those rights; the court must try a specific offence, not the character of the defendant.

At the other extreme, the Cops see the world with hardly any grey at all. Forget the complications. If you committed the crime, you take the consequences.

Socioeconomic disadvantage? Digby Anderson didn't take long to deal with that one: "Obviously we aren't interested in their backgrounds in the slightest."

The mugger got Mace in his eyes? Roger Graef shrugged. "It's an occupational hazard." The burglar got pummelled? He's lucky that's all he got. Another informant remarked tersely that Tony Martin's only mistake was to fire the bullet in the back of the young burglar he killed instead of the front.

Cops say that of course evidence about prior arrests for rape should be admitted.

It is "absolutely essential" in the view of one of them. And if there is a way to get a guilty offender to admit his guilt painlessly, by all means use it. Isn't that the point of police work and trials, to find out the truth of what happened?

So which are you, Progressive or Cop? If you had 0-1 Threes, consider yourself a bleeding heart. If you had 2-3 Threes, you are Progressive; 4-5 Threes makes you a Cop; 6-7 Threes and you should be working for the New York City police department.

I showed the hypotheticals to some of Britain's most prominent jurists, politicians, police officials and advocates for criminal justice reform, plus an unsystematic scattering of others who have taken public positions on these issues.

I promised anonymity on specific answers to those whose public positions made it awkward to voice opinions at odds with the existing law or with their party's position.

Who were the Cops and who were the Progressives? In one respect, the results were predictable. Six of my informants were leading advocates for liberal penal reform.

None of them gave more than two answers that could be categorised as Threes. No surprise there.

Now consider the results from the public officials who hold or have recently held important positions related to criminal justice. There were 10 of them: three politicians, two judges, two senior police officials, a senior civil servant in the Home Office, a senior administrator of the prison service, and an academic who has been an influential adviser on legal policy. Who were the Cops and who were the Progressives?

Sir David Phillips, former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), qualified as a Cop. None of the other nine did; all were Progressives of one variety or another. Four of them gave just one answer that could be classified as a Three; four of them gave two Threes, and one gave three Threes.

There were a few more Threes and a few more Twos among the public officials than among reformers, but so few that there's no way to get around the basic conclusion: the profiles of answers from people who have devoted their lives to advocacy of progressive reforms were nearly indistinguishable from the profiles of people who are part of the criminal justice elites.

These people were chosen to answer my questionnaire because of their prominence in the debate, not as a random sample. The results should not be interpreted as statistically representative. But there's no reason to think the sample was weighted toward the left.

Two of the three politicians were Tories. David Ramsbotham came to his post after a distinguished military career. Sir Charles Pollard may not be a Cop, but he was a career policeman. Retired Judge Oliver Popplewell and Professor John Spencer scarcely qualify as wild-eyed liberals. David Faulkner worked for 30 years as career civil servant in the Home Office. Only Lord Woolf has a long history of published views that would clearly make him a Progressive.

As a group, these representatives of the criminal justice elites are likely to be a bit more conservative than the average. And yet all but one were Progressives in their view of justice. How can this be, when the group would appear to be so politically diverse? I think the answer is that they all took the ground rule seriously: "In answering these questions, the only issue is your own conception of justice, whatever that may be. Considerations of practicality, expense or expediency are irrelevant."

Liberal or conservative, they talked about the essence of justice as they saw it, and that essence included many complications and qualifications that prevented most of their answers from being classified as Threes.

Thus one public figure among my informants, politically conservative, answered the first hypothetical by saying: "It is just (his emphasis) to take into account disadvantages which have contributed to the bringing of a particular offender to a particular point in his life when he committed that offence, and that would in many circumstances lead you to impose a slightly more lenient sentence than you otherwise would." The same man found it just to take remorse and likelihood of reoffending into account, for reasons having nothing to do with his support of strict law enforcement but with the underlying conception of justice in which he believes.

My point is not that the criminal justice elites are uniformly soft on crime in practice, rather that just about everyone in the elites has bought into a broadly similar philosophical view of justice--a view that sees a just sentence as a complicated balancing of the nature of the offence, the particulars of the offender's situation, protection of the rights of the offender, and concern with the effect that a sentence will have on the offender.

David Blunkett is certainly not soft on crime, but even he might very well be defined as a Progressive by his answers if he had been available for an interview -as might Tony Blair.

The specific policies of those who share a Progressive view of justice can vary widely. People like Lord Woolf resist the government's reforms ferociously, thinking they are profoundly wrong. People like Blunkett and Michael Howard urge increased use of imprisonment; but that practical policy, aimed specifically at reducing the crime rate, is not inconsistent with a view of the role of prison that would permit answering One to the first three hypotheticals.

What I have not heard people in the criminal justice elites, including the toughest reformers, espouse are positions such as "the prison population should depend on the number of people who commit serious crimes, and if that means tripling the prison population, so be it".

I have not heard them say: "Whether prison rehabilitates people is irrelevant in deciding whether an offender should go to prison." I have not heard them say: "Tony Martin did nothing wrong."

As far as I can determine, not just from my interviews but from the published commentary on the government's policies, the number of the criminal justice elites who hold such views is close to zero.

In such an environment, any get-tough policy is operating against the wind. Many of the originators of the policy see themselves as engaged in regrettable necessities and, given the alternative, would take a less harsh approach. Large numbers--by my estimate, a large majority--of the senior administrators of tough policies oppose them outright.

At this point, I suspect, some readers of this article may wonder how anyone could object to the prevailing elite wisdom.

Wouldn't any reasonable person agree that sometimes a person's background is so disadvantaged that it has to be taken into account? That remorse should to be taken into account? That the likelihood of reoffending should be taken into account? That offenders don't give up their rights when they commit a crime? That criminal defendants must be protected from unproven allegations of past offences? That hitting a burglar may be understandable but still should be against the law?

Or, to put it more bluntly, I can hear a substantial number of readers asking: what kind of simple-minded reactionaries gave a majority of answers that I classify as Three?

Well, Tony Martin for one, who during a long conversation near his home in Norfolk gave me a poignant account of what it was like to be at the centre of one of the defining cases of the criminal justice debate. But he would take that position, wouldn't he?

Norman Brennan, the director of the Victims of Crime Trust, qualified as a Cop, but he is also a (retired) real cop and he runs an advocacy group that is as far to the right on the crime debate as the Howard League is to the left. What else would one expect?

David Green, director of Civitas, and Digby Anderson, director of the Social Affairs Unit, are Cops. But that too is predictable: they run conservative think tanks and write books about the importance of the two-parent family and civility and traditional British values. Those books evince formidable erudition, so the "simple-minded" label is hard to pin on them, but their attitudes toward justice will naturally be a bit reactionary.

Explaining away Jonathan Aiken's answers poses more of a problem. The former Tory cabinet minister, imprisoned for perjury, is now a committed Christian and an active supporter of restorative justice--so active that I nearly classified him with the progressive advocates. And yet he qualified as a Cop. "I haven't gone soft on crime just because I was in prison," he remarked.

Roger Graef also would seem to be a natural Progressive--he has made television documentaries critical of police practices and in favour of alternatives to prison--but a majority of his answers were straightforward Threes.

The other Cop, as extreme a Cop as anyone I interviewed, was Frank Field, the same Frank Field who has been representing an archetypal working-class Labour constituency in Birkenhead for a quarter of a century and was Blair's minister for welfare reform. He is an intellectual who has written influential books on public policy, all rooted in the political philosophy of the left. And yet there he sat, running through the hypotheticals, seldom requiring more than a sentence or two to render his crisp and sometimes pungent opinions--and nearly all of them were Threes.

The Cops among my informants were not such a homogeneous group, and brushing them off as unreflective or reactionaries can't be done if you've talked to them. Their view of justice is simple, not simple-minded--a profoundly important distinction.

It is pretty clear where my own sympathies lie. My view is that many clever people are drawn to the nuances of the progressive concept of justice, but none is smart enough to get it right. I believe in simple, retributive justice, which has its roots in the dawn of human history. I will explain why next week.

Hypotheticals

The ground rule. In answering these questions, the only issue is your own conception of justice, whatever that may be. Considerations of practicality, expense, or expediency are irrelevant.

Two men are guilty of a robbery in which the shopkeeper was severely beaten. One comes from a disadvantaged environment and the other comes from an advantaged one. Is it just to punish the advantaged offender more severely?

1. Socioeconomic disadvantage can be a factor in determining culpability, and is justly taken into account in deciding on the punishment.
2. The sentences should be the same, but the treatment after sentence can justly take the nature of the disadvantage into account.
3. Socioeconomic background is irrelevant.

Two men are guilty of a robbery in which the shopkeeper was severely beaten. One offender is remorseful, while the other is unrepentant. Is it just to punish the unrepentant offender more severely?

1. Yes.
2. Yes, within limits.
3. No.

A person knowingly commits a serious crime, but you have infallible foreknowledge that this person will never commit another crime, even if he is not punished. Is it just to use this knowledge to diminish the severity of the punishment?

1. Yes.
2. Yes, within limits.
3. No.

A woman is dragged into an alleyway by an unknown assailant. She sprays Mace in the assailant’s eyes, enabling her to escape but causing permanent damage to the assailant’s eyesight. Did the woman act rightly? Does the assailant have a just complaint against her?

1. The woman used disproportional force, and the assailant has a just complaint.
2. Technically, the woman used disproportional force, but she should not be prosecuted and the assailant should receive only nominal damages.
3. The woman acted rightly and the assailant has no complaint.

An offender enters a home to burgle it. Upon finding the owner at home, the offender flees into the street. The owner runs after the offender, catches him, and pummels him, causing bruises and contusions. Did the homeowner act rightly? Does the assailant have a just complaint against the homeowner?

1. The homeowner was right in chasing the burglar out of the house, but wrong to pummel him, and the burglar has a just complaint.
2. Technically, the homeowner should have just held the man for the police, but the homeowner should not be prosecuted and the burglar should receive only nominal damages.
3. The homeowner acted rightly and the burglar has no complaint.

A man is on trial for rape. In addition to the evidence involving this particular rape, his record includes four arrests, with circumstantial evidence but no convictions, for rape. Is justice served by letting this additional evidence be part of the trial?

1. A just trial must be limited to the facts of the present case. Admitting evidence from prior cases is unjustly prejudicial.
2. Such evidence may justly be admitted only for convictions or unusually similar modus operandi.
3. Juries should have access to all evidence that is relevant for assessing the likelihood that the defendant is guilty.

A drug is invented that infallibly makes people give truthful answers to questions and has no adverse side effects. Is justice served by compelling all criminal defendants to take the drug and submit to questioning about the alleged offence?

1. No.
2. It would be just to do so, but should be prohibited on other grounds.
3. Yes.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at AEI.