Baggini on sentencing

[sawyl]

The closing paragraph of Julian Baggini's piece on judicial punishment in yesterday's Guardian sums up the current situation rather well:

The right response to this outbreak of exceptionally harsh sentencing is therefore pretty much the same as the right response to the outbreak of exceptionally anarchic violence. We need to understand why it has happened and the real social problems and issues that led otherwise decent people to support, or at least be sympathetic, to it. But in the end, calmly and with good reason, we need to explain why it is wrong, and put an end to it.