It is unlikely that hostile attitudes about criminals or beliefs that punishments for crime were too lenient were the major causes of the explosive increase in punishments in the United States after 1970. Public hostility toward criminals has been a consistent theme in this country for a long time, but it did not cause big increases in imprisonment before 1970 in the United States or large expansions of incarceration elsewhere. In this article, the authors argue that growth in the salience of crime as a citizen concern and increasing public distrust of government competence and legitimacy were two of a number of changes that transformed ever-present hostile attitudes into a dynamic force in American politics. Negative attitudes toward offenders are a necessary condition for anticrime crusades, but they are always present. It was the addition of fear and distrust into the law and politics of punishment setting that produced the perfect storm of punitive expansion.

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This article focuses on the war on drugs in the Philippines in order to explore issues related to extra-judicial killing, which remains common in many countries that have abolished the death penalty and in many more that retain it but seldom carry out judicial executions. In the first year of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency (2016–17), thousands of people were killed by police or by vigilantes who were encouraged to prosecute his war on drugs. At a time when democracy is in retreat in many parts of the world, this case illustrates how popular harsh punishment can be in states that have failed to meet their citizens’ hopes for freedom, economic growth, and security.

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In prosecution, as in armies, prisons, and schools, organization matters. Japanese prosecutors work in an organization that differs markedly from the organizations in which their American counterparts work. This fact has important implications for how prosecutors in Japan define and perform their central tasks and thus for the quality of Japanese criminal justice. Most critically, the Japanese way of organizing prosecution enables prosecutors to effectively manage the tension between two imperatives of justice that American regard as often incompatible and always in tension: the need to individualize case dispositions and the need to treat like cases alike so as to achieve “order.” As mirror and model, Japan can teach the United States how to improve the level of order in its own systems of criminal justice.