Judge Dredd Arrests Poverty, Puts It In An Iso-Cube For Mega City One Crimes

Reading 'A Better World', which would be better titled: 'Defund the Judges'

“The poorer the population the more violent crimes they commit and we just let a lot of really poor people in,” Judge Hershey says on page three of A Better World. A few pages later, Judge Maitland discovers that “we can wipe out crime” if Mega City One just spends all the money on education instead of judges, according to her “models” of criminality. Maitland’s reasoning leaps from environmental intervention — cleaning up slums and improving urban architecture — into a “social engineering” panacea for all forms of crime, using anecdotal examples of ‘reform’ in much the same way anti-police ‘social justice’ advocates do in the real world.

Indeed, the problem with A Better World, a series of 2000 AD stories issued from September 2020 and reissued in January 2025 in the United States as one volume, is how dated and debunked its imaginary world has already become in those five years. Social services and therapists cannot deal with violent people in the street. It is also strange that Mega City One, the city of the future, has yet to impose body cameras on judges even though they have become ubiquitous among law enforcement since the summer of George Floyd.

A strange thing then happened. Whereas Black Lives Matter activists once demanded that every officer should wear body cameras because they expected the recordings would reveal systemic police misconduct, exactly the opposite has occurred. Reel after highlight reel has instead shown justified use of force by well-trained officers who try everything short of shooting before they shoot. Imagine someone armed with a mere clipboard trying to intervene in this situation: “Hello citizen, I’m from the Mental Health Department and I’m here to help.”