For a long time I was genuinely puzzled, though not surprised by the obtuseness of the the Tories who, despite all the evidence of lower crime rates and the inappropriateness of longer and harsher sentences for offenders, are into building more prisons and compelling the courts backward to more retributive and lengthly prison terms . In general I shrugged and put it down as simply another in the long list of irrationalities of the right. Then I read the remarkable recent book by Bernard E. Harcourt The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press, 2011). Harcourt is Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Harcourt manages through detailed and assiduous historical research and analysis, to trace the intimate linkage between the mythology of the market and the tendency of this mythology to increasingly embed the punitive and penal institutions of society.