Fear of crime has turned many people into prisoners inside their own homes. They avoid walking alone, hesitate to make eye contact with strangers on the street, rush through errands instead of lingering, grow anxious buying and selling in unfamiliar places, and feel uneasy the moment they cross from one neighbourhood into another. How did this storm of crime and violence build up around the world? Why does the criminal instinct in youth gangs keep rising against strangers and against people who have done nothing to deserve it?
These are frightening questions, and no society has yet traced their causes with real precision. It is one of the quieter tragedies of our time that even when law-enforcement officials and government leaders are aware of the deeper reasons behind serious crime, they often find themselves unable to act on that knowledge.
The veteran American journalist Schroeder, writing on this problem, took a position that cuts against most conventional criminology: he argued that searching for the causes of crime in poverty and social conditions is largely a waste of effort, because the real cause is the weakening of the moral code – the shared sense, instilled early, of what separates right from wrong. Without it, he argued, people cannot reliably tell good from evil, and it becomes essential to hold offenders themselves responsible rather than to keep pointing at their circumstances.
Wrong Explanations, Right Instincts
Most criminologists, sociologists, and government officials, in Schroeder’s view, reach for the wrong solutions. Some blame thin police staffing. Some blame easy access to weapons. Others blame a flawed justice system, or violent entertainment, or poverty itself. Each of these plays some role in worsening the problem, but none of them, on its own, explains crime – there is no clean, direct link between any single one of these factors and why a person turns to crime.
Poverty in particular gets far more blame than the evidence supports. It is true that impoverished, run-down neighbourhoods create social conditions that raise the odds of criminal behaviour. But poverty itself does not manufacture a criminal mindset. In both developed and developing countries, the overwhelming majority of poor people are neither criminals nor drawn to violence. Only a small minority within that population turns to crime – and the reasons for that minority becoming criminal are, on close inspection, considerably clearer than “poverty” alone. It is also worth asking why theft, dishonesty, and violence are rising among the children of middle-class and even well-off business families, and inside ordinary schools – populations poverty cannot explain at all.
The First and Deepest Cause
The first cause of crime is society’s failure to properly instill and share its own values. Where a society fails to pass on correct values, and offers no real resistance to people who show no resistance to crime themselves, criminal tendencies take root – whether the person in question is poor, rich, or solidly middle-class. Criminal thinking is, at bottom, a product of eroded morals and distorted values: a desire to get something, regardless of who is harmed in getting it, paired with an unwillingness to wait and pursue that desire through patient, lawful means. Impatience, in this reading, is not a minor character flaw but one of the direct drivers of criminal attitude.
The Need for Discipline
One veteran police officer put it plainly when asked why so many children go astray: in thirty years on the job, he had concluded that the absence of discipline was the single biggest cause of crime. A family that never teaches a child discipline, and a child who never learns to restrain his own desires, is very often a family and a child who eventually meet in a courtroom – because by then, restraining that child has become genuinely difficult.
Writing in the Conservative Chronicle in February 1988, the columnist William Marchison made a related point about how societies misdiagnose this problem: “Now is the time that all of us – white, black, brown, whatever colour we happen to be – come to understand something together. Colour is not what divides a society. What actually divides it is the real dividing line: the line between good people and bad people – between those who accept responsibility toward society, and those young people who are simply unfamiliar with what that responsibility even means.”
It falls to parents and to society’s elders to make sure children absorb this early: to recognise instability, dishonesty, and lying for what they are; to resist bad instructions rather than simply obey them; to respect other people and their property. A society that fails to teach these lines to its children early is, in effect, guaranteeing that those children will collide with serious criminal problems later. A stable, morally grounded family is essential to breaking free of crime – and it is a real misfortune that stable family structures are dissolving quickly through rising divorce and separation, while many parents are simply too consumed by work and by their own pursuit of comfort and leisure to raise their children properly.
The Cost of Moral Relativism
For decades, a philosophy of moral relativism – the refusal to maintain any firm line between good and evil – has become almost fashionable, spreading from homes into schools, colleges, and even religious institutions. This philosophy has produced results that are genuinely shameful and, for a society, corrosive. Criminal attitudes exist in every social class, but they cluster more heavily in the internal, disadvantaged neighbourhoods of major cities – in the United States and elsewhere – where the idea of the intact family has already come apart. Many children in these neighbourhoods have no father figure to model themselves on; the only available model for what a “successful” life looks like is the gang or the street tough on the corner.
The predictable result is a generational decline in respect, kindness, and meaningful tolerance for others, alongside a growing number of young people whose hearts hold little mercy or compassion – young people who have come to believe they can only really feel something in the moment they take another person’s dignity away from them. How many parents actually play a strong, active role in shaping who their children become? Plenty of children exist whose character formation needs more attention, more guidance, and more discipline than others’ – discipline that must still be delivered with affection and love, not in place of it.
The Need for Real Punishment
Character is, ultimately, a product of free moral choice. Even parents who set a genuinely good example, and raise their children on solid values, can still see those children drift toward criminal behaviour – often because the children have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that they won’t get caught, and that even if they are caught, the punishment will be light.
Crime only really stops when every person tempted to commit it is certain the punishment will be swift and sure. That certainty rarely exists today. Yesterday’s juvenile offender becomes today’s adult criminal, in part because a slow and uneven justice system fails to catch up with him for the crimes he has already committed, and sends him straight back to the same streets to commit more. A justice system already overloaded with a huge population of repeat offenders simply lacks the capacity to properly punish the next young offender coming up behind them – and who can really be expected to stop committing crime after watching a friend beat the justice system in front of his own eyes and come out looking like a hero for it?
There is almost certainly some real flaw in a nation’s institutions and justice system when an unfortunate belief like this – that crime pays – is allowed to settle into the hearts of the people committing it. What makes this situation genuinely troubling is how many people know, in their hearts, exactly right from wrong, and choose to take advantage of illegal and criminal opportunities anyway, so long as no one actually calls them a criminal to their face. Part of the reason so few offenders are caught and properly punished is depressingly human: when a criminal’s own friend gets caught, the instinct is often to cover for him, forgive him, or quietly benefit from what he got away with.
What It Takes to Actually Cut Off Crime
Ending organized crime requires withdrawing the public tolerance that quietly sustains it – the shrug that lets gambling, prostitution, negligence, and the illegal drug trade continue because millions of ordinary people are willing to make use of what these networks supply, whatever damage it does to public health along the way. White-collar offenders and business owners often justify their own theft with the same excuse ordinary thieves use: everyone else is doing it too. Employee theft and dishonesty, multiplied across a whole workforce, adds up to a heavy price for a society to pay – shops and businesses lose roughly ten times more to their own employees’ theft than households lose to burglars, and bank employees’ betrayal of trust causes far more damage, in the aggregate, than armed robbery does.
If a society genuinely wants to shut off the source of its crime problem, its dominant majority – and especially its leaders and role models – need to hold themselves to a visibly high moral standard, so that everyone can see, in practice, that dishonest, deceptive, violent, and corrupt people will never be tolerated, respected, or protected by the powerful, and will instead be exposed and punished. Unfortunately, that ideal is difficult to find fully realised anywhere in the world.
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