Resist Not Evil

Resist Not Evil is the most comprehensive, sweeping, compelling, and unsettling case ever penned against what is laughably called the criminal-justice system.

Clarence Darrow is best known today for being the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. But that case actually played a minor role in his life.

He was an attorney who learned by experience that the entire state apparatus of courts, trials, and prisons is the worst single feature of the state. He came to see the entire machinery as a gigantic fraud, a purveyor of injustice, itself a producer of criminality. He became a radical, and Resist Not Evil is his manifesto.

How could it be the worst arm of the state? Because, in the same way that the state cannot plan the economy, "the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice." He proves that point. It taxes people more instead of bringing about compensation. It kills rather than righting wrongs. It ruins lives rather than building them up. It cares nothing about victims; instead it makes more of them.

The "night-watchman state" of the old liberal legend is actually the core of the problem.

In many ways, his conclusions are the same ones that Murray Rothbard came to so many decades later. The remarkable fact is that Darrow's book was published in 1902, when the state was much smaller and had not built its current-day empire of tax-funded police, prisons, and courts.

Fair warning: This book is extremely unsettling. It will shake you fundamentally. You will never look at judges, police, courts, and jails the same way. It could change your whole outlook on politics — permanently.