Studies of the effects of the police on crime suggest that a 1 per cent increase in local police numbers will reduce local crime by 0.5 per cent. As for the effect of crime on the wellbeing of residents, a leading British study estimated that a 0.5 per cent fall in crime would increase average life satisfaction by 0.0011 points (out of 10). In this chapter we combine these findings, calculating the BCR for one more police officer, using the Treasury approach, which values one extra point of wellbeing for one year at £15,258. The result is a healthy BCR of 12:1.

Since at least 1989, prosecutors have sought to use rap music evidence to convict defendants. To date, nearly 700 cases involving this practice have been identified from commercial databases, media reports, and word-of-mouth. Cases exist in virtually every state and in both federal and state courts. Over time, “rap music evidence” has evolved to include not just lyrics and songs handwritten on paper but also recorded songs, videos, photographs, hand signs, and fashion choices. As technology has advanced, evidence now may be found online or offline.

The regulation of the night hours did not depend on public illumination. A symbol of political presence in Europe, streetlights would have been a sign of gross negligence in the combustible cities of early modern Japan. In their stead, legislative alternatives were put in place by shoguns and domain lords to keep the night in check. Their path toward the regulation of the night may have differed from that of their European counterparts, but the endpoint was the same: By controlling darkness, they demonstrated both around-the-clock presence and a commitment to order. The beliefs and practices of the urban residents for the most part aligned with the vision of rulers and administrators. Regulation, thus, came not just from above but also from below. The Tokugawa urban night, regulated from above and below, challenges triumphal rhetorics of luminous progress crafted by the Meiji ideologues first and picked up by modern historians later. More broadly, it shows how Tokugawa Japan participated in the global transformation of the night not by following a path traced by others but by charting its own.

The chapter looks at addictions in the context of evolution and evolutionary mismatch, noting that feeding addiction relates to ultra-processed food. It compares addiction to such foods and to drugs. Sexual addiction can be to partnered sex or to pornography. In love addiction, the target is one individual. The notion of gambling addiction is discussed. Exercise can have some addictive properties (e.g. escalation, craving, and withdrawal symptoms). The chapter then returns to the topic of non-suicidal self-injurious behaviour. Somewhat similar to NSSI in showing addictive properties, are body-focussed repetitive behaviours (e.g. hair pulling and skin picking). Suicidal behaviour can provide a kind of long-term preoccupation and has overlap with chemical and sexual addictions. Crime including violence can take on properties of addiction. There is a comorbidity between domestic violence and drug addiction. Ding and Li describe digital addiction as a ‘functional impairment’ and a ‘global health problem’.

Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which frenzy was weaponized during the many religio-political upheavals of the period. As a figure of speech, it offered rich material for English polemicists, who knew that questioning their opponents’ sanity was more effective than simply refuting their claims. As a literal diagnosis, frenzy also had a practical use: it could silence politically inconvenient people without making a show. This chapter shows how its conferral was used to justify the incarceration of prophets, mystics, and kings. Yet the diagnosis had one serious drawback: it gave its recipients the gift of innocence. Frantic persons were incapable of crime, and could neither be convicted nor punished for their actions. If a recipient later became not just inconvenient but too dangerous to live, any previous diagnosis – no matter how spurious – had to be redacted from the record. This was a problem for the religious polemicists too: the aim was to pathologize ‘heretics’ ‘papists’, ‘puritans’, and ‘sectarians’, not to excuse them from all wrongdoing. Eventually, this chapter argues, that flaw drove Anglican polemicists to abandon frenzy for a new diagnosis: ‘melancholy enthusiasm’.

Chapter 3 focuses on Hong Kong, where there were 261 death sentences but no executions after 1966. Chinese hostility to democratic reforms prevented the constitutional advances that occurred in other colonies in this period and left the British government vulnerable to parliamentary scrutiny in the wake of an execution. Previous studies argued that Britain required Hong Kong’s governors to commute death sentences from the mid 1960s, but colonial correspondence shows that clemency was not automatic until a decade later. Clemency appeals were judged on a case by case basis, even after Governor Murray MacLehose’s decision to uphold Tsoi Kwok-cheung’s death sentence was overruled by the British government in 1973. MacLehose thereafter played a central role in negotiating the Hong Kong Executive Council’s support for reprieves and eventually oversaw de facto abolition, as he strived to prevent capital punishment compromising his administration’s reform agenda. MacLehose also set a precedent for future governors by opposing reforms to the death penalty in other British Dependent Territories, which he feared would draw unwanted attention to Hong Kong’s anomalous position.

Chapter 3 shows that although urban denizens increasingly sought to prevent loss, possessions still went missing on London’s streets. In response, Londoners established and developed systems of reclamation. Institutions such as the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Bank of England were important in developing systems for dealing with lost plate and bank notes. However, alongside these systems, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, the capital’s residents also benefited from the great age of print culture. Londoners printed handbills and had them pasted up around the city, but a big change took place with the onset of newspaper publications. Newspapers such as the London Gazette and daily newspapers such as the Daily Courant included advertisements for lost watches, strayed dogs and servants who had runaway. As the chapter shows, the efficacy of such notices was at times bolstered by thief-takers, but as the century rolled on, the advertisement themselves became more popular. The chapter shows how urban denizens often sought to simply reclaim their possessions rather than pursuing the prosecution of the thieves who so often ‘found’ them.

The manageability of the technical obstacles set out in Chapter 4 established, this chapter turns to the adaptive challenges amalgamation faces – most notably its inconceivability to the judiciary. The chapter details the maladaptive constraints that underlie the constitutional drafters’ and legal establishment’s resistance to embracing vernacular law as part of South Africa’s ‘law of general application’ or ‘common law’, as well as the urgency of overcoming such resistance. Depicting the severe decline in institutional trust and rising support for undemocratic governance amidst the public’s waning hopes of material security, the chapter argues that, to strengthen South Africa’s rule of law, constitutionalism must be founded on the vernacular legal traditions that resonate with everyday South Africans, who often feel alienated by a legal system rooted in ‘uncommon’ law. Alter-Native Constitutionalism offers a sustainable path to transformation that would counteract public disillusionment with a constitutionalism that embraces rigid colonial precedents and simultaneously restore trust in the judiciary as the last line of defence. The chapter therefore argues for judicial praxis that re-envisions courts as mediators supporting collective agency, rather than mere adjudicators, thus fostering a relational approach aligning with Ubu-Ntu and honoring the country’s diverse normative traditions and social justice aspirations.

To explore what it meant to own and possess in the eighteenth century, Keeping Hold looks to instances in which people lost possessions and how they responded to such experiences. Chapter 2 begins the book’s focus on loss and does so by looking to urban sites. It looks to the city of the eighteenth century: London. The capital was of growing importance in this period as an economic powerhouse and social hub. Guidebooks emerged as an important genre for those seeking to comprehend London’s densely filled and ever-lengthening streets. The chapter explores these sources and finds how the capital was increasingly imagined as a site of deception and loss, where possessions might be pickpocketed or simply left in the bustle and in which servants and apprentices regularly ran away. The chapter examines how eighteenth-century Londoners responded to such perceived threats by utilising technologies of security, such as pockets and collars. By doing so they worked to prevent loss.