What to do about crime is a question the capitalist parties are forever debating without ever coming near a solution. They refuse to accept that capitalism causes crime
The Tories, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are all preoccupied with the problem of crime because crime is one of the principal concerns of the public. Even the smaller political organisations have been forced, by public demand, to address the question.
That demand is based on the proximity of crime — theft, burglary, mugging, armed robbery, car stealing, violence and murder, to name only the illegal variety — to the citizen. Crime is not now only something most members of the public read about; it is a frightening reality for most people, either as a personal experience or through association with a friend or neighbour. Nor is the illusion of security traditionally reinforced any more by the presence of the ubiquitous policeman a comfort. Despite massive increases in their numbers and vast sums spent on prevention and detection technology, the police response to run-of-the-mill crime is such that thousands of offences go unreported.
Like unemployment and the problems of the NHS, crime has become a potential election winner — or loser. As such, it occupies the attention of government and opposition while, in the background, specialists, like the police, criminologists, sociologists and other experts wrestle with the problem. Like poverty, homelessness, unemployment, health care and other acute problems of our present social order, no politicians, experts or academics would dare to suggest that they could ever solve the problem of crime; indeed, they all claim that crime results from our “human nature” and, therefore, all they can do is create mechanisms for containing the fruits of our human frailty.
Gutter media
The problems for the politicians and the experts is that they face a public opinion largely fed by a gutter, headline-seeking press which, like the criminals, benefits from crime — without taking any of the chances the criminals have to take. Recently Channel 4 had a programme on crime and its prevention in its series, Power and the People. Of the 300 people used in an experimental programme aimed at testing the citizen’s response to intelligent persuasion — as opposed to the brutal rhetoric of the gutter media — most of the suggestions for dealing with the problem of crime, offered by the majority of these voters, made the crimes they were discussing seem innocent and benign.
The floggers were there, the throw-away-the-key brigade, string-’em-up was well represented, cut-off-their-fingers seemed a cross-cultural response. Listening to the “solutions” offered by these opponents of crime, it occurred to this writer that, if the 300 had been a convocation of criminals, the innocent would be in grave peril.
Happily, and most instructively, after they had heard from the experts, police officers, criminologists, jailers and others, about the application of some of their “solutions” there was a swing of 12 to 15 percent towards more civilised views. The point is, though, that these people were a random sample of the electorate; the people with votes; the people who want something done.
It places the humane politician in a dilemma. If he, or she, has done their homework on the question, they know that all the knee-jerk “solutions” have been tried and found wanting. The death penalty didn’t stop sheep-stealing or reduce murders. An obvious, and an economically-effective, means of ending the intractable problem of “joyriding” would be to give the offenders the means, through employment or otherwise, of having a car, but that sort of solution would not win votes. Indeed, recently we saw the reaction of the gutter scribes of some of the tabloids and the so-called “quality” press to attempts by penologists to create some self-esteem in youthful criminals by exposing them to something that their station in life doesn’t allow them to contemplate — a holiday in East Africa.
But elections, for the politicians, are about winning. That means that political parties cannot be seen to be soft or innovative about crime — and many of the opinion-formers think that looking for its cause is being “soft”. In the Channel 4 programme referred to earlier, Labour leader Tony Blair was subjected to questioning about his attitudes to crime by people whose questions showed that they suspected him of being “soft” on the subject. He squirmed but his solutions, though more intelligently expressed, were essentially the same as those of Sir Ivan Lawrence, a typical Tory twit who had been questioned earlier. Blair may not have believed the nonsense he mouthed but capitalist politics are not about changing people’s ideas but with identifying with those ideas in order to get votes.
Of course it is easy to understand public reaction to crime — especially those most despicable of crimes carried out against the poor, the weak, against children or on the elderly. Actually, such crimes, though they get the big headlines, are relatively rare and represent a very small percentage of all crimes. The overwhelming volume of crime, some 94 percent, is against property and the offences at the top of the crime league, in monetary terms, are rarely associated with members of the working class. The really big money is in fraud, embezzlement, insider trading, insurance racketeering, tax evasion and the like.
Mammoth swindle
In these matters detection and convictions are low because there are grey areas between capitalism’s legal thieving and the illegal variety. An example of this appeared in the Observer on 15 May of last year and concerned a mammoth swindle carried out by insurance companies cashing in on Tory pressure on workers to join, or transfer to, private pension schemes. The Director of the Serious Fraud Office, responding to enquires about the insurance super-crooks said: “We have neither the resources nor the powers to investigate the whole area of personal pension transfers”. The same cannot be said about the resources and powers enjoyed by the army of snoopers the state employs to detect social security fraud.
Crime is a filthy business. According to Ken Smith, in his book Free is Cheaper, it employs about one million people, guarding, protecting, policing, transporting, arresting, convicting and incarcerating. The police, especially, are judged by the number of convictions they achieve and over the last few years there have been a succession of cases that have shown that police officers of all ranks are as ready to use thuggery, lies and deceit to achieve their purpose as are the criminals. In the upper echelons of crime, opportunity often plays a part in determining who is the criminal and who the victim but, at the low end of the crime scale are the really sad eases, the mugged, the terrified, the deprived and the injured. It is difficult for these victims to appreciate that the petty criminal is the product of the same system that made them his, or her, victim.
Free Access
Socialists do not need an answer to the problems of crime. We are organised to gain majority support for the abolition of capitalism, and the achievement of a society in which all human beings would have free and equal access to the goods and services they need. It requires little mental effort to appreciate that, in a society where everybody could avail of their needs the overwhelming burden of crime would disappear.
Space precludes a deeper examination of that other small volume of crime that does not appear to be directly connected with property but which usually results from the values and conditioning of people in a property society.
Capitalism without crime is just not possible. Most of the more repressive and brutal means advanced for its containment are not only angry, despairing and degrading ways of striking back at the criminal, they are utterly futile. While we have competition, profit, aggression, conflict and, of course, poverty, despair and alienation, we will have crime and while we have capitalism we will have all of these things.
Richard Montague
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