We create a society which influences its individual members to offend against the law of the land, with the motivation for doing so being either a display of piratical greed, or a sense of revolt against the entire system. They see the system as promoting undeserving people to positions of affluence and power, while entrenching others there, and all of it at the expense of their own potential opportunity. Crime offers an alternative to blind acceptance of a system they regarded as being unfair from the start.

If the criminal stands guilty, so do we for the creation of this society which failed his aspirations. It should not therefore be a case of us increasing the degree of penalty so as to coerce the offender by deterrent force, into an acceptance of the lifestyle which he previously rejected. We should instead be applying our investigative skill to identify the direction in which society needs to be altered, so as to retain the loyalty and involvement of such offending individuals, as well as identifying the best methods for re-educating them so that they begin to perceive the society which we shall be creating as something into which they can discover the slots involving real opportunity in life.

The ideal should never be to incarcerate offenders, but to oblige such individuals to attend rehabilitation courses - provided of course, that it can be established that they are no longer a danger to the public. A system of open prisons would thus appear to be our best option for the future, with psychiatrists rather than warders as the profession most suited to take them in charge. And once an offender is believed to have made the necessary transition in attitude, sufficient that he should thereafter be accepted as a potentially useful participant within society, then he should be freed from practically all custodial restraint.

The biggest effort of all however, should be for us to change the society in which we dwell, so that it becomes more attractive to young people at the outset of their lives, and inspires them with the wish for fuller involvement. And much will depend upon the levels of constraint, which are fixed upon the lifestyle of all recently released offenders, so that they can reenter the social fold with their potential for rehabilitation unquestioned. We should be concerned to encourage and promote all manner of socially beneficial aspirations, wherever the personal qualities for such achievement are sufficiently in evidence. Special investigation should be made to discover where such talent, and such ambition, might lie unseen; and in a society where individualism is to be promoted, then the range for such potential development should be as wide as possible.

The requirements of individualism also anticipate that there should be maximum freedom of expression for all members of society. But here again constraint of some manner becomes inevitable when particular members of it choose (for example) to distribute snuff films, for the titillation of criminally unsympathetic sexual appetites, or films of sadistic violence for the entertainment of our children. Prosecutions might be invited on the grounds that such videos constitute an incitement to murder, or to racial hatred perhaps. But it does remain a delicate matter to discern when we might be justified in applying the heavy hand of censorship.

We are seldom able to take our moral stance over particular examples of behaviour on a basis of always, or never. Such judgement requires application over a continuum of examples, where the subjective points of both tolerance and intolerance might be suggested. The admissibility of advertisement is an appropriate case for consideration, with its requirement to establish when people should be constrained from attempting to persuade the rest of us to behave as they might wish. An advertisement to murder might seldom be tolerated. But the judgements might differ if it were to encourage us to smoke cigarettes to the point when health is liable to be impaired. A majority view is all that we could really hope to establish on such an issue, which then promptly becomes political.

We find ourselves subjected to far more behavioural constraints than is healthy for individualism. We are forbidden to drive above speed limits, which even the police recommend being raised; we are limited in the hours that we may choose to drink alcohol in public places; we are forbidden to partake of certain drugs, which many a psychologist would regard as no more dangerous than alcohol; we are forbidden to seek for the sexual services of a prostitute in many a quarter they frequent; we are forbidden to participate in certain forms of sexual intercourse, even with a consenting adult partner. There is much that demands instant reappraisal, with a view to diminishing the levels of behavioural constraint.

The idea of there being any particular group of appointed individuals subjectively deciding what is good, or healthy, for the rest of society to adopt as their standards is abhorrent to my libertarian values. The direction of required change (currently pioneered in Holland) is to legalise as much as we might possibly dare on the manner in which we might choose to behave, and to regard what is done in the open as being that much easier to control. The hope is that people can be persuaded to change their habits, with the assistance of psychologically appropriate advertising campaigns - paid for by the imposition of taxes on the sale of such antisocial products.