It also charts the changes in policing from the 1960s to the present day, and examines and criticises the workings of the modern British prison system, including a chapter on the author's visit to Wormwood Scrubs.

Hitchens contends that the former principle of "due punishment of responsible persons" has been abandoned in favour of vague modern theories of rehabilitation.

Bryan Appleyard, writing in The Sunday Times, described it as "a marvellous, angry polemic" that accounts for and charts how the British Police force became so "institutionally bureaucratic, sullen, chippy and ineffectual".

[3] In The Sunday Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple agreed with the main arguments in the book, writing "Mr Hitchens places the blame firmly where it belongs: on a supine and pusillanimous political establishment that, for four decades at least, has constantly retreated before the verbal onslaught of liberal intellectuals whose weapons have been mockery allied to sentimental guilt about their prosperous and comfortable lives, and whose aim has been to liberate themselves from personally irksome moral constraints, without regard to the consequences for those less favourably placed in society".

An updated edition, re-titled The Abolition of Liberty: The Decline of Order and Justice in England (ISBN 1-84354-149-1) and featuring a new chapter on identity cards ("Your papers, please"), and with two chapters – on gun control ("Out of the barrel of a gun") and capital punishment ("Cruel and unusual") – removed, appeared in April 2004.