Crime & Punishment; Not an Open and Shut Case

- Remy Kalter

Britain currently has many social ills. A nation racked by yobbish, anti-social behaviour where “happy slapping” (assaulting people, filming it and sending it to others on mobile networks) is becoming increasingly prevalent. The government measures to tackle crime seem fairly misguided and desperate. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, almost a victim of such an attack, supported the 2005 move to ban hoodies, which were seen as a main cause of crime, as they prevented the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain (the highest per capita anywhere in the world) from identifying offenders. A logical idea perhaps, but a misidentification as to the cause of crime, it most definitely is.

There are many takes on how to combat crime effectively, with prevention and rehabilitation clearly the main focus of efforts to do so. However, the means to achieve these ends vary enormously. From a sociological standpoint, criminals tend to come from underprivileged backgrounds and to prevent re-offending, need to be made aware of the effect of their crimes on victims. The solutions, therefore, are to reduce poverty and to use the much-vaunted notion of restorative justice (RJ), a concept that, in the modern, western notion of law and rehabilitation, Canada has pioneered. However, RJ is based on the idea that the individual appreciates the detrimental effect their actions have had on others, but David Rose’s essay on Lives of Crime uses statistics from New Zealand which have shown that 20% of criminals fit the description of “psychopath,” who do not fear punishment, thus threatening them with sanctions, penal or otherwise, has little effect.

By this thinking, it would appear that rehabilitation would have little chance of preventing them from re-offending, with up to 80% of psychopaths having re-offended within four years. Thus, those who argue against RJ would say that such an idea is essentially mollycoddling the offender. At the same time, if an individual is very possibly going to re-offend, then should they be incarcerated for life? Keep in mind that although most psychopaths do re-offend within four years, one-fifth do not, thus if we have any belief in our criminal justice system, this is clearly not the answer.

Anti-social behaviour is obviously a huge social and financial cost and “prison gates are all too often a revolving door through which offenders return within months.” Perhaps prisoners should pay for their crimes by literally working for next to nothing, thus lessening the burden on the government. This, however, raises a whole host of security issues, not to mention ethical implications and the effect on employment in low wage, unskilled sections of the economy.

Thus the key idea now is perhaps to see how one can best prevent people, early in life, from becoming delinquents. The most immediately obvious means to do so would be to reduce economic hardship and prevent maltreatment of children. However, Rose identifies that although maltreatment does increase “the risk of later criminality by about 50 per cent, most maltreated children do not become delinquents or adult criminals.” Poor parenting has been seen to have a devastating impact on a child’s development of social skills, so intervention in the home would appear to be a suitable measure to employ, to a degree. There is also a feeling among many researchers that to modify anti-social behaviour in the adult mind is akin to closing the barn door once the horse has already fled. Perhaps true, perhaps overly pessimistic, but certainly a thought to keep in mind.

Overall, what all this information suggests is that the criminal mind is not one entirely created out of the environment, but also of the mind. Thus can a criminal in fact be blamed for their actions? In the Western legal model, the criminal law is based on the idea that a criminal exercised a choice. If their mind worked in such a way that a choice was not presented to them, then no crime had been committed, and thus they would be sent to an asylum.

There are certainly biological factors present in those with a tendency to commit criminal acts, and I cannot possibly cover them all here. What has been noted is that those with a propensity to delinquency exhibit, in their youth, “low intellectual ability, reading abilities, hyperactivity and slow heart rate.” Also, a single genotype of a gene could be found to have a profound effect on an individual’s propensity to commit a crime. Of all the individuals in the survey who had been maltreated as children and went on to become offenders, 85% of them exhibited this genotype. Stirring statistics, to say the least.

According to a recent Economist report, the British government is looking to change the law so that they can “lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.” This idea, coupled with the invasion of surveillance technologies in Britain certainly brings to mind Orwellian notions of an authoritarian society. Anyone who saw 2002’s Minority Report is clearly thinking this sounds all too familiar. Criminologists in the 1960’s saw the idea of a criminal personality as abhorrent and sociological criminologists of today are similarly dismayed by findings which they deem to be deterministic and an attack on civil liberties. In the current environment of wire-tapping and surveillance, such a claim infuses the sociologists argument with added impetus. However, to ignore the findings of the reports that link biology to a propensity for anti-social behaviour would be, in and of itself, socially irresponsible. Perhaps it is time that the judicial system looked into “pre-crime” and the idea of monitoring potential law breakers. But let us also keep in mind that our system is not broken, thus calls for extremism would be misguided, and would indeed impinge upon civil liberties.

Background & Research
Life of Crime; A 7 part series focusing ondifferent aspects of crime (BBC)
Lives of Crime - David Rose - Prospect Magazine, Issue 125, August 2006.
Free to choose? (The Economist) - December 19th, 2006
The Centre for Restorative Justice - Simon Fraser Suniversity
Britain is "Surveillance Society (BBC) - November 2nd, 2006