From time to time there would be American prisoners in the prison in which I worked in England. They were offered the choice of serving their sentence back home, but they never availed themselves of the opportunity. The American system, they said, was much more brutal and violent than the British, which is itself by no means known for its unflagging humanity. They preferred to stay where they were.

There is much about the American criminal justice system that is inclined to appall foreigners, and no doubt many Americans too. The disgraceful treatment of Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought this into sharp focus. His case popularized a phrase in the vocabulary of more than one language: the perp walk.

The perp walk would be bad enough if it were confined to proven perpetrators. It is precisely a ritual public humiliation of wrongdoers that the law is (among many other things) designed to prevent. “Revenge is a kind of wild justice,” wrote Francis Bacon a long time ago, “which the more men’s hearts run to, the more ought law to weed it out.” But as the case of Strauss-Kahn demonstrated, it is not confined to perpetrators. He had not been convicted of anything at the time he was made to walk it (and has not been convicted since). He may be an unsympathetic character or worse, but still justice and decency are owed him. An accused man is innocent until proven guilty; he is not merely a perpetrator-in-waiting; and even