Oakist Press release
Crime, Punishment and Justice
An Anarchist Perspective
A wide-ranging examination of crime, punishment and justice that asks why modern societies remain so attached to policing, prisons, courts and retribution, even when these institutions repeatedly fail to prevent harm.
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About the book
Crime, Punishment and Justice examines what happens when people hurt one another, take things, cross boundaries or lose control – and why the institutions that claim to protect us so often create more damage of their own.
The book dismantles the myths supporting punishment and traces how justice became professionalised, bureaucratised and weaponised. It explores the histories of sin, law, policing, prisons, criminalisation, poverty, prohibition, public spectacle and state violence.
It asks why society continues to confuse suffering with justice, why harms committed by poor people are criminalised while corporate and institutional harms are frequently tolerated, and why punishment remains politically attractive despite its repeated failures.
Rather than offering an idealised world in which harm disappears, the book examines restorative justice, transformative justice, community accountability, mutual aid and survivor-centred responses as practical alternatives to cages and revenge.
The central question is not simply who should be punished, but what needs repairing, how further harm can be prevented and who must take responsibility for making that repair possible.
“If the system worked, it wouldn’t need to keep getting bigger.”
Dicky Dread
Inside the book
Punishment is not justice
Police, prisons and courts are commonly presented as the foundations of social safety. Yet harm continues, prisons remain full and the institutions responsible for maintaining order continue to expand.
This book argues that punishment frequently provides spectacle, reassurance and revenge rather than safety, recognition or repair. People who have suffered harm are reduced to witnesses in the State’s case, while the underlying conditions that produced the harm remain largely untouched.
Justice should be judged by what it produces – whether harm stops, whether survivors are heard, whether responsibility is taken and whether future harm becomes less likely.
About the author
Dicky Dread writes from a life lived at the edges of the systems he critiques.
Under his academic name, Richard Leach, he is a professor of physics and an established author of textbooks on physics and measurement. His wider writing brings together science, anarchism, counterculture, lived experience, mutual aid and practical alternatives to conventional institutions.
Alongside his academic career, he has spent decades immersed in traveller culture, festivals, off-grid living, music, protest, informal communities and the everyday experiments in cooperation that occur outside conventional systems.
Crime, Punishment and Justice continues the work begun in Practical Anarchy and Drugs and Addiction, asking how people can respond to harm without reproducing the violence, hierarchy and exclusion they claim to oppose.
Publication details
Author: Dicky Dread
Publisher: Oakist Press
Publication year: 2026
ISBN: 978-1-0667835-0-2
Ordering
Available now
UK
£19.99
Europe
£26.99
Rest of World
£29.99
First print copies have been ordered. To order a copy, contact Oakist Press by email with your delivery country and quantity required.