What am I not getting about crime?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I like to think of myself as a good person. I’ve never deliberately set out to hurt anyone. I’ve never committed an assault, or a robbery, or a murder, or whatever else. I don’t even have any particular inclination to do so. Same with drugs. I never had the slightest inkling that drugs would be something I might like to try. I don’t even drink or smoke, not out of some deep-seated ideological conviction but just because I think tobacco and alcohol taste awful. I very much agree with the sentiment that an honest man doesn’t need the law to tell him what “right” behavior is. I suppose I also adhere to Rational Theory of crime, which holds that people commit crimes because they consciously choose to, with the expectation that the rewards outweigh the risks.

This becomes an issue for me when I see someone who proposes a legal or policy change to help combat crimes. I don’t really get the point of this. It isn’t my responsibility to fix someone else’s criminality… It’s their responsibility to refrain from criminal behavior. So I get confused when I read about how we need to regulate guns or legalize drugs or things like that. Most of these policies hinge on the idea that crime is inevitable, so we should take steps to reduce/mitigate/regulate the undesirable behavior. I disagree with these policies because I disagree with the notion that crime itself is inevitable.

People talk about how we can prevent mass shootings, for example, but I don’t see why NOT committing mass murder or terrorism is an unreasonable expectation. It seems that many billions of people on this planet get through their whole lives without ever committing a mass shooting, so why is it so hard for other people to control themselves? Have they just figured something out that the criminals of the world are still struggling to understand? The same could be said about rape, or robbery, or drug use, or whatever. The expectations civilized society places upon us are pretty clear. What is it about crime that is just so darned attractive that people can’t be reasonably expected to resist?

2

“Civilized society” doesn’t have a right, in my opinion, to tell me that marijuana use is a crime. Sure, I could conform my behavior to society’s expectations, but then what happens if they tell me that oral sex is a crime? (it was once true, and it wasn’t that long ago)

As for “real” crimes, there are a sizeable number of people in this world who cross the line for a variety of reasons. Each crime probably has different variables. The people who commit rape are not necessarily the people who cheat on their taxes. There has been lots of research into why people commit crimes, I don’t think much of it concludes “it’s just so darned attractive.”

3

It seems to me that your approach Chihuahua is to count on 100% of the people being on their best behavior 100% of the time. While it’s true that billions of people go about their day without committing a crime, it only takes a few people to make everyone else miserable.

4

Except in the case of the mentally ill, or people who are so drug-addled that they are not rational, this is the answer. People commit crimes because they believe that the benefit to them is greater than the risk of harm/being caught. The effect is magnified because people in general have a hard time calculating risk, especially long-term risk.

The mass shooter believes that shooting a group of people will relieve his anxiety/depression/anger and make him feel better. His desire to feel better outweighs the potential risks. Many times he expects or intends to die in the attempt, but feels that the relief he will feel from the act, combined with escaping from his life, are worth any potential downside.

The armed robber believes that the money he will gain is worth the risk. The rapist believes that the feeling of sexual power is worth the risk. The drug user believes that the high is worth the risk.

If you don’t think that current measures to mitigate crime are necessary or effective, do you have any suggestions? How can we convince people that the rewards are not worth the risk, given that the current risk level is not enough to stop them?

5

Crime is the problem it is, largely, because our society has refused to ask exactly the questions that the OP raised. For starters, we have conflated crime with victimless but disapproved behavior, which has blown the statistical number of “criminals” far out of proportion to those who are genuinely antisocial. We have then created a criminal “justice” system in which people convicted of “crimes” are, for all practical purposes, stripped of their citizenry and forever excluded from an opportunity to live outside the criminal circle.

There needs to be a realistic dialog addressing the identity of true criminals, and a mechanism for minimize society’s exposure to those who do not respond to rational motivational therapy. Instead of simply casting a net to bloat the enforcement statistics and then marking the catch with an indelible brand of felon.

6

So you never lock your house when you leave, right?
And you leave big piles of cash sitting around, too. After all, there’s no reason to think that a crime is inevitable…

7

This.

One in ten people is a bit off. One in ten of those is a way bit off. One in ten of those is way way off. One in ten of those is pretty much batshit crazy.

It only took me getting to 10,000 for batshit crazy. Live in a place with a few hundred thousand people and you’ll have more crazy/criminal people than you know what to do with.

8

Miserable people will do miserable things. Depression, anxiety, terror, abuse, and more can warp a person’s view of the world and their place in it. In terms of violent crimes and drug abuse, these are often people who have mentally fallen down a black hole and have a warped view of their situation and capabilities. In the long term this creates people like the drug addicts. In the short term this creates people like the guy who was “only” going to rob a corner store but ended up shooting somebody during the stress of the situation. There are some people I think who were not born capable of being good, law-abiding citizens, but they are probably very few. The rest are reacting to their circumstances, either real or perceived. Until we have figured out a way to achieve utopia for everybody and eradicate mental illness and abuse, we will continue to have crimes. And since this utopia is considered impossible, we therefore assume that expecting all people to behave ideally and logically is also impossible. And the next step that is assumed is, since we can’t eradicate it, we must try to regulate it as much as possible. Therefore, gun law reform and so on.

There is also SpoilerVirgin’s assessment that humans are poor evaluators of long-term risk. And humans living in poor living conditions have even shorter long-term risk evaluation skills. All they know is they’re unhappy right now, and all they can foresee is continuing to be unhappy, and the day ahead looks just as miserable as the day behind, in an unbroken string of misery. Not everyone is strong enough to overcome that. There’s the common saying that doing the same thing and expecting the result to change is a fool’s errand. So they take a drastic risk to try and create a drastic change.

YMMV on the type of crime being committed, though. As mentioned, tax evasion is not movitated the same way as the crimes of rape, or murder, or dealing drugs.

9

I have never studied criminal justice or psychology but I have a number of years of human observation behind me. First, I do not think there is a “Rational Theory of crime.” Criminals do not make rational estimates of the risk. I believe they ignore or grossly underestimate risk or there would not be so many of them in prison. I think there are myriad psychological and social problems at play that lead to crime in most cases.

This is similar to the naive “Why can’t we all just get along?” theory of human conflict. Reasonable people resist. Not all people are reasonable.

I believe in the theory of Normal Distribution of human traits. That is, there are a bunch of people who speed on the highway, use recreational drugs, cheat on their taxes, or other such vices that are illegal but not rigorously enforced. Those are the people near the mean, median, and mode. Then a couple of standard deviations below that are people who steal, then as you get into the tail you get the violent criminals, and way down there you get the hired killers and mass murderers. At the other end you get the Goody Two Shoes types who make it a point to color inside the lines. This is statistically inevitable.

10

Your theories seem to be based on some fundamental misunderstandings of both human psychology and of law and morality.

Let’s start with human psychology.

Good for you for abstaining from harmful substances. But something to realize is that not everyone decides the way you do. The fact that you comment on the taste of those things indicates that you might not understand why people use them. Drugs are quite enjoyable (within limits). This isn’t some fringe belief; many many people use recreational drugs like alcohol or tobacco or to have a good time or lifestyle drugs like caffeine or prozac to make their daily lives better. They do this even though the short and long term effects might be a net negative. That is, they are not really behaving rationally. Perhaps you have no interest in that at all. But if you can’t understand the reasons people use drugs, you’re going to have trouble understanding the other ways in which they do not act rationally.

Ok, now law and morality

I’m a little confused by this because it comes right after the bit about drugs. Is there something wrong about drugs, in your mind? If so, what is it? Is it different for alcohol than for cocaine? If drugs are wrong because they are harmful, is eating unhealthy food morally wrong? Is failing to exercise enough? How about watching reality television instead of reading an intellectually stimulating book? Should there ever be something that’s wrong, but not against the law, or something that’s against the law, but not wrong?

The fact is that there’s a wide range of behavior that people don’t really agree on the morality of. Although there are a few things that almost everyone agrees on, the vast majority of moral and legal issues are relative. And it’s not particularly obvious where to draw many of the lines. Armed robbery is obviously bad, right? But, if you don’t voluntarily pay your taxes, eventually armed men will show up and force you to do so. All totally legal, and proper, mostly because we have collectively decided that we’re going to do it this way, and most of the other ways we’ve tried to do things didn’t work very well.

Do you want to clearly assign responsibility, or do you want to live in a world with less crime? Prioritizing the former won’t necessarily lead to the latter.

When a theory conflicts with reality, you should probably choose to believe reality. The evidence that crime is inevitable is manifest. Your theory that people behave rationally has little to support it beyond wishful thinking.

11

Similar to religious folks that wonder how an atheist keeps themselves from going on criminal, or moral outrages.

That scares me about religious folks. “Is that all that holding YOU back”?

12

Never underestimate the flavor of sky cake.

13

I don’t think poverty is inevitable but we still need anti-poverty programs. I don’t think ignorance is inevitable and yet we need schools. War is not inevitable, but we have an army.

The people charged with running the country have to deal with the world as it actually is, not as you wish it to be.

People ARE expected to resist it. That’s why there are cops and jails. What did you think those were for if not to punish people for not meeting expectations?

14

Your fundamental error is to confuse two things by prevaricating on the concept of “expectation”.

Yes it is reasonable to *expect of people that they don’t commit crimes. No it is not reasonable to expect that people will consequently not commit crimes.

In the first sentence I mean “expect of” in the sense that one reasonably holds a view that people should not (in the moral sense) commit crimes.

In the second sentence I mean “to expect that” in the sense of making a probability judgement; it is not reasonable to hold that expectation because history shows that a certain percentage of people will (however unreasonably) commit crimes, so to expect otherwise is foolish.

Once one understands this distinction the dilemma falls away. The “issue” you describe in your second para is actually a non-issue. There is no conflict in holding the view that people shouldn’t commit crimes, but also that they will, and so precautions need to be taken.

It’s the same non-dilemma that gives rise to the perpetual merry-go-round when rape is discussed. There is actually no rational conflict between holding the view that there is no behaviour on the part of a victim that justifies them being raped and that certain behaviours are more likely to result in a person being raped, so those behaviours might not be a good idea.

*I am by the way speaking of non-victimless crimes. There are far too many victimless activities that are criminalised but probably should not be.

15

Taking these two opinions of yours together leads me to this reasoning:

There is a non-zero number of people in this world who are not honest. There is also a non-zero number of people in this world who might normally be honest, but may enticed to commit crimes when they believe the rewards are high enough.

This seems to disprove your opinion that you “disagree with the notion that crime itself is inevitable.”

Therefore, the only defense against crime is for society to punish it severely enough to convince rational people that the rewards never outweigh the risks.

Is that your opinion?

16

You people realize that crime rates are at an all-time low?

17

Nooooh!

Fear!

Uncertainty!

Doubt!

Black Islamic Kenyan Communist in White House!

You can only be saved from the dreadful danger you are in if you vote for ME!

18

Fixing others’ criminality may not be your responsibility, but it’s definitely in your interest. It’s a pretty simple question:

Do you want less crime?

If so, take/support action to effect a decrease in the crime rate. Install a system that applies adverse consequences (e.g. fines, incarceration) for activities deemed criminal, provides counseling to motivate criminals not to engage in criminal activity in the future, and/or provides criminals with post-incarceration alternatives to criminal activity (e.g. job training and employment connections).

You are confusing “should” with “is.” People should not commit crimes, and yet they do, and you have to deal with that reality (the one with criminal activity). Expecting people to abstain from criminal activity is not unreasonable, but there are unreasonable people out there:

[ul][li]Some people have had an upbringing in which they were taught that engaging in criminal activity is OK.[/li][li]Some people were, quite literally, born without a conscience. [/li][li]Some people have poor impulse control: a WANT pops into their brain, and they act to satisfy that want without adequately considering the future adverse consequences to themselves or others. [/li][li]Some people come from cultures where physical assault is considered a reasonable response to verbal insults.[/ul]As described above, it may not be your responsibility to work against these sorts of things, but if you don’t like it, you’ll certainly want to.[/li]

If we believed crime was inevitable, we wouldn’t bother trying to stop it. Instead, it would just be something that happens, like rain, and you just try to live with the consequences.

But clearly we don’t believe crime is inevitable. We believe that we can make criminal activity more difficult (e.g. by locking physical things, by securing computer systems with passwords, by keeping dangerous tools away from people who are more likely to use them to facilitate criminal activity, and by not putting ourselves in situations where we are more likely to be victims of crime), and more expensive (e.g. by allowing victims to defend themselves with physical force, and by forcibly taking wealth and time from criminals as a consequence for their criminal activities).

Crime is not “inevitable” in the sense that every living person WILL become a criminal if the police disappeared overnight. But it is “inevitable” in the sense that there will always be some small percent of the population who need incentives above and beyond their own conscience in order to dissuade them from committing crimes.

19

Why do you think that is?

Do you think that it’s because you are “good” (as you say)? Do you think most people who commit crimes “set out to hurt” someone?

If so, I’m not as confident as you are.

We can look at those hoary standbys:

  1. Would you steal a loaf of bread if you were starving? If your children were starving? If your children were starving and the baker refused to sell you bread because you were the wrong religion/race/class/career?

  2. Would you turn a Jewish family over to the Gestapo? Would you turn an escaped slave over to the slave hunters?

We can figure out points where our facile definitions of good and evil seem to fall apart. It’s not good to obey the law if the law is evil. Not obeying an evil law means you commit crimes and are a criminal, but maybe a good person.

And we can figure out points where the law is not evil but breaking the law is understandable and (for some, at least) forgivable. The stolen loaf of bread. Hunting down the six-fingered man who killed your father.

So maybe crime and the law aren’t completely, 100% cut and dried. But you and I would undoubtedly agree that most of the crime that occurs in most of the places Dopers live is not this sort of crime. But does any of it resemble this sort of crime in some ways? I think some of it does. I think lots of people are desperate. Some of that desperation is their own fault, sure. They were stupid, or careless, or lazy, or are just plain fools with bad judgment, and they might think they have nothing to lose. And I think the crimes are usually not a good solution to the desperate predicament, when it exists. But people with bad judgment are known to make bad choices. That’s what bad judgment is.

So, foolish people getting caught in circumstances, perhaps of their own making, that make them feel desperate. I bet that accounts for a nice chunk of crime. Not all of it. Probably not most. But I think it’s a chunk.

I only point this out to show that I think some crime really is perfectly gettable, and a matter of circumstances. I’d love to think I am just above that sort of behavior, but what if I’ve just been a lucky person who has never been tested?* That suggests, at least to me, that if we can keep people from being tested, we can reduce crime.

Win-win. The person benefits and the world benefits.

  • I know I am an extraordinarily lucky person.
20

For my own part, I can sort of get how someone might be enticed to rob a bank, or perpetrate some kind of white-collar crime a-la “Office Space”, or some other really high payout crime. Those kind of things really are risk vs. reward, and are typically robbing a big nameless corporation. Even robbing a commercial business makes some sense in that regard.

But it’s the petty crime- muggings and burglary, and situations where you’re threatening someone personally and stealing their personal posessions that incenses me. It takes a whole other sort of self-centeredness and moral turpitude to deliberately make that decision to break someone’s window and steal their stereo, or bust in their window to steal their TV and jewelry just so you can sell that stuff for a few hundred bucks at most. Oddly, I tend to think that THEY ought to be the ones fed into industrial shredders, not the guys perpetrating the armored car heist.