'The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy'

[The Saucepan Man]

Tolkien seems to harken back to some kind of "organic" form of social organization where the people as individuals were responsible for their society.

You make an interesting point, Bêthberry . Gondor and Rohan did have military institutions which no doubt acted as some form of "police force" and would have been used to keep order where necessary. And in the Shire, of course, Shirriffs were charged with keeping order. We do hear very little of crime and punishment in LotR, although that is no doubt because the narrative is focussing on wider events. I would suspect that there were criminals in both Rohan and Gondor, and that each had in place some form of criminal justice system.

I can see wat you are getting at with regard to the Shire, though. The Shirriffs clearly had very little "serious" work to do, and the fact that Sharkey's Men had to use storage tunnels as Lockholes suggests that there had previously been no requirement for a jail.

Similarly with Elvish society. There seems to have been little need for individuals specifically charged with keeping order. Although Thranduil had dungeons in his Palace, I would suspect that these were more for locking up outsiders than for incarcerating denizens of his realm. Really, it is difficult to imagine there being much need for a system to compel good behaviour in Elvish communities. There are, of course, exceptions (Saeros' dispute with Turin and the Kinslaying at Aqualonde spring to mind), but on the whole Elves seem to have been fairly capable of taking individual responsibility in this regard.

But these are surely highly idealised societies. I really cannot imagine any but the most rudimentary of societies existing in reality without some means of keeping order. And, in terms of the level of advancement of the Hobbits and Elves in LotR, the equivalent societies in our history had criminal justice systems of sorts (even if they were not terribly just by our standards today).

As I said, I can imagine the Human societies in Middle-earth having formal systems directed towards compelling comliance with the law. I wonder, therefore, whether Tolkien was intentionally drawing a distinction between Elves (and Hobbits) and Men in this regard.