Published in 1962, Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange proved to be prescient in a more oblique way than its admirers would have you believe. Though it foretold the surge of violence, crime, and social pathology that was about to overtake many Western cities, both the book and the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film that followed are so deeply equivocal that what is most unsettling about them is not so much that they predicted urban moral and literal decay but that they predicted the step beyond that—the cringing and excuse-making of the bien-pensant class, which would come to worry that the cure for crime might be worse than the epidemic itself.

After a crime spree that includes rape and murder, Burgess’s young hood Alex is in effect mentally castrated by the Ludovico brainwashing technique. His interior reform results in his being freed from prison after a brief period when he should instead have been stowed behind bars for life. Burgess fretted that the treatment amounted to unconscionable dehumanization, withdrawal of freedom of choice. Yet prisoners, especially those placed under maximum security for committing the most heinous crimes, don’t have a lot of choices, either. They certainly lack the option to commit violence against those outside the prison. Criminal justice means withdrawing from the convicted almost all choices: where to live, when to get up in the morning, when and where to move, where to eat, what to do all day, what time to put the lights out. The