Why I've Changed My Mind on Crime
Or why prisons are a good idea actually
I’m as strong an advocate for ending the War on Drugs as anyone but is the 8:12 to Pheonix Park really the place for it? As the potent waft of cannabis drifts down the tram for the third time this week I’m seriously contemplating becoming Peter Hitchens. Every commute is a snapshot of our country’s fraying social fabric, every night out an exercise in making sure you get home with your phone, your wallet, and your life. One of my main complaints about the Britain of 2023 is that everything is expensive and nothing works but I’m adding a third point; nowhere feels safe. I’ve changed my mind about crime.
I should clarify that I’m not adopting an “if you can’t beat them join them” approach. Although perhaps it was jealousy that got my back up on the tram this morning, maybe I just need to chill out, spend my days inhaling marajuana instead of cowering over my Macbook. I digress. My longstanding position has of course been that crime is bad and we should do more to stop it. What “more” means to me though has changed radically over the past couple of years.
I used to think prisons weren’t a great concept. Punishment, however harsh, can’t go back and erase the original crime. Nor are they a particularly effective deterrent when the reoffending rate is as high as 43%. The academic evidence also suggests that longer sentences do not deter people from committing crime. Instead, I thought, we should focus on strengthening the social safety net and providing more economic opportunities. After all, no rational person commits a serious crime surely? Most serious offences must be driven by unmet needs or an underlying mental health problem.
Through this lens it comes as no particular surprise that the Association of Convenience Stores is complaining of unprecedented levels of theft. We are, after all, in a cost of living crisis and many are struggling to get by. More shocking though is the big shoplifting-induced hit to the margins of many retailers who don’t stock the essentials. The FT reports that John Lewis is blaming co-ordinated “shoplifting to order” for the £12 million increase in year-on-year stock loss. Primark, Next, and Mountain Warehouse, amongst others are also bemoaning the brazen increase in shoplifting. Attacks on retail workers almost doubled in the year 2021-2022
The issue with the permissive liberal view is that the epidemic of crime in this country - shoplifting or otherwise - isn’t caused by increasing numbers of ordinary people turning to law-breaking at a time of hardship. The reality is that most crime is committed by the same people again and again. New York police found that many thousands of shoplifting offences in the city were carried out by just 327 people. Another study found that 1% of the population are responsible for 63% of violent acts of law-breaking1. We are already really really good at preventing people from embracing the life of crime because the vast majority of us don’t. Crime shouldn’t be tolerated as a natural part of the social order. It is abnormal and law-abiding citizens are paying the price.
Tony Blair’s famous “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” slogan has - at least in theory summed up the liberal/left approach. But it’s high time we focused more on the “tough on crime” part of that equation. What should that look like in practice? More prisons and longer sentences. The classic counter to this position is as previously mentioned that prison isn’t a good deterrent in the first place. But I think starting from that position is part of the problem. Prison doesn’t have to be a deterrent or a punishment it’s simply to take the people who commit crime out of society so they don’t harm the rest of us.
And I’m not going all authoritarian on you. I don’t think prison should be a horrible place to be. We should fund the system better, provide better opportunities for those inside to access drug addiction and mental health support, and to develop new skills. They should be places of dignified separation. But we must perform that separation. Criminals should be put away for a long time in better funded more humane institutions.
At the heart of this is the fundamentally liberal principle that what you do with your own body is your business but what you do to others is not. Making others feel unsafe or breaking the most basic of societal norms is not in-keeping with this notion. Therefore in a liberal society those people must be dealt with first and foremost before any attempt to address why they might have become like that in the first place.
Of course, so much of our legal system fails to respect our bodily autonomy as it is. If we’re going to lock criminals up for longer then we really ought to have a conversation about how we’re defining “criminal”. I am yet to be presented with a case of the law cracking down on an individual’s right to choose what to do with their own person where I do not side with “the criminal”. Sexually assaulting someone should land you in prison for a very long time, doing some nitrous oxide in a park should not.
A Liberal approach to how we define crime and a maximalist approach to dealing with the people we do decide are criminals, is I think, the best way forward. The situation we currently live with, where anti-social behaviour is rife, theft is to all intents and purposes decriminalised, and women cannot walk the streets alone is a policy choice rather than a fact of life.
Jesus christ my anarcho-capitalist 18 year old self would hate me as he shouts about abolishing prisons but I don’t care. Fuck him. Incidentally, I’m no longer worried I’m turning into the lesser Hitch, he seems to take the Lord far too seriously to blaspheme.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/