“I see around me a great sea of wrongdoing that seems not to lessen”. So declared Sir James Anderton, the Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police, announcing his forthcoming retirement. Anderton often claimed he was moved by god to act as a scourge to the sinful. This was something he shared with Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Anderton may be in serious need of professional help but the essence of his view, that society is plagued with the problem of crime, is held by many people.
Crime, there is no doubt, occupies the imagination. It takes up a great deal of the column inches of newspapers. We are routinely bamboozled with documentaries, soap operas, films and videos about crime. We hear radio broadcasts and read books about it. There is now in Britain even a magazine dedicated entirely to morbidly poring over famous murder cases. The level of crime and the so-called “law and order debate” are major policy issues amongst political parties at election times.
Yet what is commonly understood by "crime” is much less extensive and less deep a social problem than is often portrayed. Research in Glasgow has recently demonstrated that over 30 percent of news stories in several national newspapers are about crime, but this does not reflect the actual level of criminality in society. As Nick Ross always comforts his scared late-night viewers in “Crimewatch UK", the chances of actually being the victim of crime are infinitesimally small.
One reason for the high profile coverage is that news about crimes helps support a picture of humanity as being eternally and necessarily dogged with the prevalence of crime.
But what is "crime"? It is tempting to quickly interpret the word as meaning wrongdoings associated with violence, especially homicides. In fact, probably the best definition is that a crime is any type of conduct or event or state of affairs designated as criminal by the state. What states designate as crimes will vary with the times and the historical circumstances. There is nothing intrinsic in criminal behaviour that runs commonly through all crimes for all times. Anything can be made into a crime.
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| 93 per cent of all crime is property-based. |
But crime, as defined by the state, is not even principally about random and brutal violence delivered in a haphazard way. Most so-called crime is about people in the working class trying to alleviate their poverty. According to recent Home Office figures. the police in England and Wales recorded 4.5 million offences in 1990, of which 94 per cent were non-violent crimes of property (Independent, 28 March). So even in a world of institutionalised violence—a society of the legitimate violence of the police truncheon and the prison cell, of the recruitment of people as trained killers in the military forces—even in this brutalising environment, people on the whole arc resistant to the use of violence.
What causes crime?
Historically there have been a great many and varied accounts of what causes crime. Thus in 1746 Cesare Beccaria, who was later to become a professor of Political Economy in Milan, wrote An Essay on Crime and Punishment in which he opposed "capricious justice and barbaric punishment". Punishments, he argued, "should be certain, prompt and only just in excess of the gain to be had by the crime”.
He regarded humans as essentially rational beings who only opted for crime if there was a good chance that it would pay. Aristocrats whose ancestors had acquired their original wealth through plunder and merchant explorers who had negotiated their gains with powerful arsenals could only agree. Beccaria’s book was condemned by the Catholic Church in 1776 for its rationalistic ideas but the basis of his theory has had an enormous influence, especially its implication that if you fix the punishment at the appropriate level this will deter crime as the potential criminal will then rationally opt not to commit it. This type of reasoning is still very popular with governments: the Home Office is forever playing around with the system of punishments and finely tuning them so that it can "beat crime".
There are a number of things which can be said about this theory but one thing is clear: it has not worked. The level of crime in Britain and in several other countries which have used this theory has not significantly altered in any respect.
A century after Beccaria another Italian, Cesare Lombroso, wrote a book in 1876 called The Criminal Man in which he claimed that criminals were a race apart from ordinary people. Lombroso had been affected by Darwin's theory of natural selection (much of which he didn't seem to understand) and saw criminals as throwbacks to an earlier age. Criminaloids could be detected by how hairy they were, the shape of their nipples and the type of eyebrows they had.
This theory was popular with the ruling class because it meant that if criminals were pre-programmed to be that way in any event then there was no need to spend money on expensive social reforms designed to stop people being forced to turn to crime. A stack of theories built on the foundations of Lombroso's basic concept of the criminal as a person set apart from ordinary people persist to this day.
There is no proven evidence for this view that criminals have a particular biological or psychological make-up. Hundreds of experiments of various scientific methods, including "endocrinological profiling" and "encephalographic screening" of so-called known criminals and normal people, have failed to discover any defining characteristic which is indicative of criminality.
Property is theft
Most crime, as noted, is property crime—offences like theft. So, over the course of a year, we are really just looking at a small number of members of the working class aiming to get goods worth a few hundred or a few thousand pounds. We should not get too engrossed in all these petty cases and the moralising obsessions of the Daily Express but should see things in their wider context.
Today a few men and women live in unbounded. extravagant luxury' gaining £100,000 per day or even hour. They do not do any work in order to acquire their wealth. It would go to them whether they were awake or asleep, in Manchester or Malibou. They are socially parasitic on the energies of the working class of wage and salary earners. Ninety percent of the population create all the wealth—excavate, mine, construct, design, service, clean, maintain, teach, nurse, cook and grow. We build the luxury houses and then go home to live in cramped accommodation. We build the Pullman coaches and then pay to travel second class. The wealth we produce, in other words, is appropriated by the ruling class with intent to permanently deprive us of the goods (to quote the Theft Act 1968). That process, however, is flattered with the name of “the wages system". If we try to get back some of the wealth we have produced, then that is called theft and is a crime.
Apart from the routine way in which the social system robs people, it also kills and maims. Each year hundreds of people are killed by companies who have knowingly taken calculated risks with people's lives. Some of these deaths have been carefully documented by the Health and Safety Executive. The London Hazards Centre has estimated that 600 to 700 people die every year from occupational injury caused by the recklessness of their employers— about the same number as personal homicides.
We are living in a class-divided society where a minority of men and women between them own and control most the the world’s wealth. Production is not run for human needs; it is run for profit, so if there’s no profit in allowing someone to work or produce food for starving people then these things won’t be done.
The radical transformation of society that socialists propose is to put the means of producing and distributing wealth in the hands of the whole community and to let the principle "from each according to ability to each according to need” be put into practice. In these circumstances, crime as it is commonly conceived (petty theft, muggings and the like) will no longer have a reason to exist.
Anderton thought he could change the conduct of individuals by personal pressure and the force of the law:
I did have a kind of dream that I might, by example and protest, change the course of things so powerfully, and influence society and the country in the matter of rightful conduct, that they would turn away from crime and disorder and wilful criminal behaviour. Sadly, this has not happened. (Guardian.,15 March).
Marx, by contrast, pointed out that people get their ideas and types of conduct from the world around them. The economic structure of the rat race makes people behave like rats:
. . . so what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences . . . what is truly human in it . . . Crime must not be punished in the individual but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed. If man is shaped by his environment his environment must be made human. (The Holy Family).
Gary Jay
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