The Criminality Gap

I believe the best way to protect the lives of law enforcement is to remove criminals from the streets. But I also believe history shows that arresting criminals and locking them up does not accomplish that goal.

If you think of criminality as a personal defect, that there are a group of people out there with bad morals who become criminals, then it’s natural to assume that if you lock up enough of them there will be fewer left on the outside to cause trouble. But the evidence suggests it doesn’t work that way. In the U.S. we lock up more people than anyone, but we still have higher rates of crime than most of our contemporaries. Unless you think Americans are particularly violent and immoral, then there must be some other explanation.

I believe that criminality is not so much a reflection of the individual criminals, but of society as a whole. Criminals are created through socio-economic conditions, through a system that often rewards such behavior and limits the other choices available to the disadvantaged. If you think of criminality as a layer of society then you realize removing the individual criminal will not change the layer as a whole. If you arrest a big-time drug dealer, a medium-level dealer will take his place. A low-level dealer will take the medium-level dealer’s spot, and some troubled kid who sees no way out of poverty and misery will step up to fill the void at the bottom level of the ladder. For every criminal locked up you create a replacement.

Truthfully, you create more than a one-to-one replacement. That criminal has family who is now without a father (even if he may have been a crappy father). That neighborhood sees crime continue and a system that focuses on punishment without resources to change the underlying dynamic. They all become more discouraged, more willing to fill the next gap when you arrest the next criminal.

We do need to lock up criminals. That in itself is not the problem. But neither is it the solution. The solution is to spend our significant resources attacking the structure that creates a criminal layer. Provide more for education. Give people the training necessary to find decent jobs and work within crime-ridden communities to create more jobs to be had. Work harder on building a society that values and rewards the right choices and you will diminish the appeal of criminality. Locking people up won’t lead to a better, safer world, but creating a better, safer world will lead to fewer people locked up.