By Ray  Madding  Mcconnell

Ray Madding McConnell’s Criminal Responsibility and Social Constraint first appeared in 1912 as one of the more philosophically ambitious works of the American Progressive Era. Though rarely cited today, the book occupies a fascinating place in the early twentieth-century dialogue between philosophy, criminology, and legal reform. Its author, who died shortly before the book’s publication, taught social ethics at Harvard and belonged to a generation deeply convinced that clearer thought could repair the accumulating confusions of modern criminal law. His book is therefore both a legacy and an argument: a legacy of Progressive rationalism and an argument for reconsidering the foundations of punishment in an age increasingly aware of causation, psychology, and social science.

More than a century after its publication, Criminal Responsibility and Social Constraint offers a valuable perspective for scholars, legal theorists, and reformers. It is a window into the moment when American thought on crime and punishment began to absorb scientific psychology, social statistics, and philosophical determinism. It presents an early, coherent version of a consequentialist theory of punishment that still structures major parts of modern practice. And it invites readers to confront the perennial tension between causation and accountability: how can a society committed to science and determinism still punish, censure, and regulate?

McConnell’s answer is that responsibility is a socially constructed tool—one that must be justified by its utility rather than by metaphysical claims about freedom. Whether one accepts or contests that answer, it remains a stimulus to deeper thinking about the moral and practical foundations of the criminal law. In that sense, McConnell’s book continues to speak forcefully to our age, reminding us that the architecture of justice must rest on reasons we can defend, not merely on traditions we have inherited.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2025. p.234.

By Jeffrey R. Baker

This article is a study of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian Realism, a progressive school of social ethics rooted in Christian theology, and its critical evaluation of American mass incarceration. Christian Realism seeks justice in society under law, formed by love as its fundamental organizing principle. It acknowledges a world with endemic structural injustices and social immorality, but it finds temperate hope in the human potential for love, redemption, and generosity. Christian Realism reckons that any institution committed to justice must inevitably compromise to achieve incremental progress toward good. But it projects steady, hopeful progress toward justice, even as systems calibrate themselves to stave off the worse effects of human nature. On this tricky ground, Christian Realism wrestles with individual morality within flawed systems, the universal struggle to act morally when social realities drive people to self-interest and antagonism. Christian Realism issues a call to evaluate society’s injustices, then to implement steps that approach justice, without regard for dogma or party. Niebuhr acknowledges that people will break the law and harm others and that society must protect itself from violence and disorder. He recognizes that every choice requires grueling negotiations between liberty and coercion, freedom and order. In this thicket, Christian Realism takes the side of the oppressed, excluded, and impoverished against entrenched powers, because a just society will provide equal opportunity for all life, rooted in an abiding love among neighbors. Evaluating the American criminal legal system, Christian Realism critiques and condemns mass incarceration and the ascendant preference for violent retribution. The society that sustains mass incarceration fails on three fronts, at least. First, mass incarceration is maximally coercive, signaling a failure of stable, fair means for confronting conflict in society. Second, the entrenched interests of mass incarceration impose corrupting pressures on individual officers and judges invested with discretion, limiting their ability to exert moral force within an unjust system. Third, economic powers have captured the carceral system to advance business interests to the detriment of human dignity, equal opportunity, and love, calcifying the criminal justice system and suppressing movements for reform. Retribution and incarceration are policy choices. A jurisprudence of love that grounds the law in human dignity opens the way for serious alternatives for measured punishment, public safety, therapeutic rehabilitation, community restoration, and social redemption. These may include polices of restorative and therapeutic justice; constructive reentry programs; shorter sentences; decriminalization; reformed plea bargaining; increased investment in education; or other novel ideas to address the forces that drive people to do harm, to treat people justly when they cause harm, and to advance restoration and redemption for the sake of a just society. Christian Realism tests every policy against its commitments to justice and love and its real consequences in the world, even when compromising for incremental, sustainable progress. Thus, Christian Realism welcomes experiments to meet the needs of a just society – order through minimal coercion, fair and stable mechanisms for addressing conflict, the empowerment of the poor and disenfranchised, and laws founded in love. 

Georgia Criminal Law Review (forthcoming 2025)