Crime and the intellectual in the United States and Great Britain

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society. pp. 282 - 294

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The vision of crime common among intellectuals goes back at least two centuries but it gained ascendancy in practice only during the second half of the twentieth century. Louis Brandeis’ claim — that modern “social science” had raised the issue whether the surrounding community was not as much responsible for theft as the thief himself — ignored the fact that blaming crime on society was a common notion among those with the vision of the anointed as far back as the eighteenth century — which is to say, before modern “social science,” though these earlier speculations antedated the practice of wrapping themselves in the mantle of science.

The vision of the anointed has long de-emphasized punishment and emphasized prevention by getting at the social “root causes” of crime beforehand and by “rehabilitation” of criminals afterwards. Subsidiary themes in this vision include mitigation of personal responsibility on the part of criminals as a result of unhappy childhoods, stressful adulthoods or other factors assumed to be beyond the control of the individual. Conflicting theories of crime can be debated endlessly, and no doubt will be, as will any other questions expanded to unanswerable dimensions. What is relevant here, however, is what the evidence of actual results has been from the ascendancy and pervasive prevalence of the intellectuals’ vision of crime — and what the intellectuals’ reactions have been to that evidence.

In the United States, where murder rates had been going down for decades, and were in 1961 less than half of what they had been in 1933, the legal reforms of the 1960s — applying the ideas of the intellectuals and widely applauded by the intelligentsia — were followed almost immediately by a sharp reversal of this long downward trend, with the murder rate doubling by 1974. In Britain, the ascendancy of the same vision of crime was followed by similarly sudden reversals of previous downward trends in crime rates. As one study noted:

Scholars of criminology have traced a long decline in interpersonal violence since the late Middle Ages until an abrupt and puzzling reversal occurred in the middle of the twentieth century .... And a statistical comparison of crime in England and Wales with crime in America, based on 1995 figures, discovered that for three categories of violent crime — assaults, burglary, and robbery — the English are now at far greater risk than Americans.

The abruptness of the reversal of a long downward trend in crime rates, on both sides of the Atlantic, greatly reduces the likelihood that the results were due to the kinds of complex social changes which take years to gradually unfold. But, within a relatively short span of time, legislation, court decisions and government policies in both Britain and the United States greatly reduced the likelihood that a criminal would be convicted and punished for a given crime, reduced the severity of the punishment for those who were punished, and simultaneously reduced the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves when confronted with a criminal or to be armed to deter criminal attacks. In Britain, the anti-gun ideology is so strong that even the use of toy guns in self-defense is forbidden:

Merely threatening to defend oneself can also prove illegal, as an elderly lady discovered. She succeeded in frightening off a gang of thugs by firing a blank from a toy gun, only to be arrested for the crime of putting someone in fear with an imitation firearm. Use of a toy gun for self-defence during a housebreak is also unacceptable, as a householder found who had detained with an imitation gun two men who were burgling his home. He called the police, but when they arrived they arrested him for a firearms offence.

British intellectuals have long been zealous advocates of gun control. A 1965 article in the New Statesman declared that firearms in private hands “serve no conceivable civilized purpose,” that “the possession or use of pistols or revolvers by civilians” was something that “cannot be justified for any purpose whatsoever.” A 1970 article in the same publication urged laws banning “all firearms” — whether concealed or not — “from the entire civilian population.”

Like so many ideas in vogue among the intelligentsia, the zeal for gun control laws has defied years of mounting evidence of the futility and counterproductive consequences of such laws. For example, a scholarly study in 2001 found that “use of handguns in crime rose by 40 per cent in the two years after such weapons were banned in the UK.” An earlier study found: “In homicide involving organized crime and drugs no legally-owned firearms were used at all, but forty-three illegal ones were.” Other studies likewise indicated that, in England as in the United States, laws against owning guns had no discernable effect on people who make their livings by breaking laws:

In 1954 there were only twelve cases of robbery in London in which a firearm was used, and on closer inspection eight of these were only “supposed firearms.” But armed robberies in London rose from 4 in 1954, when there were no controls on shotguns and double the number of licensed pistol holders, to 1,400 in 1981 and to 1,600 in 1991. In 1998, a year after a ban on virtually all handguns, gun crime was up another 10 percent.

As gun control laws were made ever tighter in Britain toward the end of the twentieth century, murder rates rose by 34 percent, while murder rates in Canada and the United States were falling by 34 percent and 39 percent, respectively. Murder rates in France and Italy were also falling, by 25 percent and 59 percent respectively. Britain with its strong anti-gun ideology among the intellectual and political elites, was an exception to international trends. Meanwhile, Americans’ purchases of guns increased during this same period, gun sales surging “to a peak in 1993 of nearly 8 million small arms, of which 4 million were handguns.”Far from leading to more murders, this was a period of declining murder rates in the United States. Altogether, there was an estimated 200 million guns in the United States, and rates of violent crime have been lowest in those places where there have been the highest incidence of gun ownership. The same has been true of Switzerland.

Yet none of this has caused second thoughts about gun control among either the American or British intelligentsia. In Britain, both ideology and government policy have taken a negative view of other measures of self-defense as well. Opposition to individual self-defense by law-abiding citizens extends even beyond guns or imitation guns. A middle-aged man attacked by two thugs in a London subway car “unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed at one of them” — and was arrested along with his assailants, for carrying an offensive weapon. Even putting up barbed wire around a garden and its shed that had been broken into several times was forbidden by local authorities, fearful of being sued if a thief injured himself while trying to break in. That such a lawsuit would be taken seriously is another sign of the prevailing notions among British officials, operating in a climate of opinion created by the British intelligentsia.

The “root causes” theory of crime has likewise remained impervious to evidence on both sides of the Atlantic. In both the United States and England, crime rates soared during years when the supposed “root causes” of crime” — poverty and barriers of opportunity — were visibly lessening. As if to make a complete mockery of the “root causes” theory, the ghetto riots that swept American cities in the 1960's were less common in the Southern cities, where racial discrimination was still most visible, and the most lethal riot of the era occurred in Detroit, where poverty among the blacks was only half that of blacks nationwide, while the homeownership rate among blacks was higher than among blacks in any other city, and the black unemployment rate in Detroit was 3.4 percent, which was lower than the unemployment rate among whites nationwide.

Urban riots were most numerous during the administration of President Lyndon, which was marked by landmark civil rights legislation and a massive expansion of social programs called “the war on poverty.” Conversely, such riots became virtually non-existent during the eight years of the Reagan administration, which de-emphasized such things.

It would be hard to think of a social theory more consistently and unmistakably belied by the facts. But none of this has made a dent on those who have espoused the “root causes” theory of crime or the general social vision behind it.

The United States was not the only country in which the supposed “root causes” of crime showed no correlation with the actual crime rate. Britain was another:

Against prodigious odds violent crime plummeted during the nineteenth century. From midcentury up to the First World War reported assaults fell by 71 percent, woundings by 20 percent, and homicides by 42 percent .... The age was cursed with every ill modern society pegs as a cause of crime — wrenching poverty alongside growing prosperity, teeming slums, rapid population growth and dislocation, urbanization, the breakdown of the working family, problematic policing, and, of course, wide ownership of firearms.

Even the most blatant facts can be sidestepped by saying that the causes of crime are too “complex’ to be covered by a “simplistic” explanation. This verbal tactic simply expands the question to unanswerable dimensions, as a prelude to dismissing any explanation not consonant with the prevailing vision as “simplistic” because it cannot fully answer the expanded question. But no one has to master the complexities of Newton’s law of gravity to know that stepping off the roof of a skyscraper will have consequences. Similarly, no one has to unravel the complexities of the innumerable known and unknown reasons why people commit crimes to know that putting criminals behind bars has a better track record of reducing crime than any of the complex theories or lofty policies favored by the intelligentsia.

Expanding the question to unanswerable dimensions, and then deriding any unwelcome answer as “simplistic,” is just one of the ways that intellectuals rhetorical skills have been deployed against facts. As another example, to demand a return to “law and order” was long stigmatized as a sign of covert racism, since the crime rate among blacks was higher than among whites.

As noted in Chapter 2, a retired police commissioner who tried to tell a gathering of judges of the dangerous potential of some of their rulings was literally laughed at by the judges and lawyers present. In short, theory trumped experience, as the vision has so often trumped facts, and the benighted were treated as not worth taking seriously by the anointed.

Similar attitudes have accompanied the same vision in Britain, where much of the media, academia and the intelligentsia in general, as well as university-trained public officials, treat the public’s complaints about rising crime rates, and demands for some serious sanctions against criminals, as mere signs of the public’s lesser understanding of the deeper issues involved. On both sides of the Atlantic, the elites put their emphasis on the problems experienced by the people who commit crimes, and on how various social programs to solve those problems will be the real solution to the crime problem in society. In the United States, even such things as “prompt collection” of garbage has been depicted by New York Times columnist Tom Wicker as part of he “social justice” needed to stem crime.

No amount of hard evidence has been able to burst through the sealed bubble of this elite vision in Britain. On the contrary, data that contradict that vision has been suppressed, filtered out or spun rhetorically by British officials — so much so that the British magazine The Economist reported “widespread distrust of official figures” — while the British media have tried to make the public feel guilty for he imprisonment of those relatively few criminals who are in fact imprisoned. Typical of the disdain for public complaints has been the response, or non-response, to the experiences of people living in neighborhoods in which institutions for released criminals have been placed.

They spoke of a living nightmare brought about by the non-stop crime, intimidation, vandalism and harassment inflicted on them by their criminal residents. All spoke of their total failure to get local politicians, MPs, criminal justice officials, police, or indeed anyone to take any notice of their desperate situation.

For many of those with the vision of the anointed , a wide difference between the beliefs and concerns of the population at large and the beliefs and concerns of themselves and like-minded peers is not a reason for reconsideration, but a source of pride in being one of the anointed with a higher vision. Peer consensus inside the sealed bubble of their vision can be enough to prevent the intrusion of facts from outside.

Meanwhile in the United States, after many years of rising crime rates had built up sufficient public outrage to force a change in policy, rates of imprisonment rose — and crime rates began falling for the first time in years. Those with the vision of the anointed lamented the rising prison population in the country and, when they acknowledged the declining crime rate at all, confessed themselves baffled by it, as if it were a strange coincidence that crime was declining as more criminals were taken off the streets. In 1997, for example, New York Times writer Fox Butterfield wrote under thee headline, “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling” —as if there were something puzzling about this:

It has become a comforting story: for five straight years, crime has been falling, led by a drop in murder.

So why is the number of inmates in prisons and jails around the nation still going up? .....Already, California and Florida spend more to incarcerate people than to educate their college-age populations.

The irrelevant comparison of prison costs versus college costs became a staple of critics of imprisonment. A New York Times editorial in 2008 was still repeating this argument in its laments about a growing prison population:

After three decades of explosive growth, the nation’s prison population has reached some grim milestones: More than 1 in 100 American adults are behind bars. One in nine black men, ages 20 to 34, are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

Nationwide, the prison population hovers at almost 1.6 million, which surpasses all other countries for which there are reliable figures. The 50 states last year spent about $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections, up from nearly $11 billion in 1987. Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan and Oregon devote as much money or more to corrections as they do to higher education.

This was by no means the first time that rising rates of imprisonment were denounced in the New York Times. Years earlier, in 1991, New York Times columnist Tom Wicker said that “crimes of violence have not decreased at all” in the wake of rising levels of imprisonment — a claim that later statistics disproved — and urged shorter sentences, as well as “improved educational and vocational services and drug treatment” in prisons, and deplored “panicky public fears and punitive public attitudes .” Here, as with many other issues, the differing views of others were verbally reduced to mere emotions (“panicky”), rather than arguments that had to be analyzed and answered with facts.

Within prisons themselves, the changed public attitudes toward prisoners in the United States were reflected in tougher measures against inmates who caused trouble:

Assaults at Folsom dropped 70 percent in four years, from 6.9 for every 100 inmates in 1985 to 1.9 in 1989. Despite a steep rise in the nation’s prison population in the 1980's and despite occasional frightening outbreaks of violence like the one at Rikers Island in New York this summer, stories like Folsom’s are being repeated all over the country. Prison officials, emboldened by a public mood that brooks no patience for criminals, say they have taken greater control of their institutions.

Hard evidence about the effectiveness of asserting law enforcement authority, both in prison and outside, made no discernible difference to those with the vision of the anointed, either in the United Stated or in Britain. Yet an inverse correlation between imprisonment rates and crime rates could also be found in Australia and New Zealand, where a trend back toward more imprisonment was likewise accompanied by a decline in crime rates.

The British intelligentsia have been no more impressed with facts than their American counterparts. The British media and academia abound with people opposed to imprisonment. The Economist magazine, for example referred to America’s addiction to incarceration — the reduction of opposing views to mere emotions being a pattern among the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic. A probation officer’s account of the difference between vision and reality, derived from listening to his car radio while driving to work at a prison, was revealing. On the radio a government minister was being questioned by an interviewer:

A well-known presenter introduced his question to a minister with the statement, ‘We all know that we send too many people to prison in this country ....’ This introductory remark was made with great assurance and confidence; it conveyed the belief that this statement was something ‘everyone knew’ and was beyond question. Yet as I listened, I knew I was driving to a prison which, despite its huge catchment area (it served magistrates’ courts from several parts of the country) was only half full. What is more this institution took the seventeen to twenty-year-old offender age group, known to be highly prolific offenders. If any prison was going to be full, it should have been ours. Yet for some years it had only been half-full at the most and was often far less occupied than that. At the very time that the Today programme was confidently misleading the public over the numbers of offenders being given custodial sentences, the Home Office was drawing up plans to close our prison and many more besides.

In Britain, as in the United States, it is often taken as axiomatic that “prisons are ineffective,” as The Economist magazine put it. The reason: “They may keep the offenders off the streets, but they fail to discourage them from offending. Two-thirds of ex-prisoners are re-arrested within three years of being released.” By this kind of reasoning, food is ineffective as a response to hunger because it is only a matter of time after eating before you get hungry again — a kind of recidivism, if you will. Like many other things, incarceration only works when it is done. The fact that criminals commit crimes when they are no longer incarcerated says nothing about whether incarceration is effective in reducing crime. The empirical question of the effect on the crime rate of keeping more criminals off the streets was not even considered in this sweeping dismissal of prisons as “ineffective.”

The ideology of “alternatives to incarceration” is not only a shibboleth among the British intelligentsia, but is also backed up by the self-interest of government officials in reducing expenditures on prisons. Although statements about how much it costs to keep a prisoner behind bars, as compared to the cost of keeping a student at some expensive college, have become staples in arguments against incarceration, the relevant comparison would be the cost of keeping someone in prison versus the costs of letting a career criminal loose in society. In Britain, the total cost of the prison system per year was found to be 1.9 billion pounds, while the financial cost alone of the crimes committed per year by criminals was estimated at 60 billion pounds.

In the United States, the cost of incarcerating a criminal has been estimated as being at least $10,000 a year less than the cost of turning him loose in society. Despite all empirical evidence, however, the New York Times in 2008 continued to speak of imprisonment as “a terrible waste of money and lives,” lamented that “incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen” and repeated the old argument that some states “devote as much money or more to corrections as they do to higher education.”

In Britain the anti-incarceration ideology is so strong that only 7 percent of convicted criminals end up behind bars. In December 2008, London’s Daily Telegraph, in its on-line publication Telegraph.co.uk, reported: “Thousands of criminals spared prison go on to offend again. It said: “More than 21,000 offenders serving non-custodial sentences committed further crimes last year, casting doubt over Labour’s pledge to make the punishments a tough alternative to jail.” The transformation of Britain wrought by the triumph of the vision of the anointed may be summarized by noting that Britain, which had long had one of the lowest crime rates in the world, had by the end of the twentieth century seen its crime rate in most categories rise several-fold and eventually surpass that of the United States.

A young man visiting Britain shortly after the Second World War, Lee Kuan Yew was so impressed with the orderly and law-abiding people of London that he returned to his native Singapore determined to transform it from the poverty-stricken and crime-ridden place that it was at the time. Later, as a leader of the city-state of Singapore for many years, Lee Kuan Yew instituted policies that resulted in Singapore’s rise to unprecedented levels of prosperity, with an equally dramatic fall in crime. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the crime rate per 100,000 in Singapore was 693 and in Britain it was over 100,000. Singapore had, in effect, gone back in time to policies and methods now disdained by the intelligentsia as “outmoded” and “simplistic.”

In light of the fact that a wholly disproportionate amount of crime is committed by a relatively small segment of the population, it is hardly surprising that putting a small fraction of the total population behind bars has led to substantial reductions in the crime rate. However, that is not sufficient for those who take a cosmic view of justice and lament that some people, through no fault of their own, are born into circumstances far more likely to result in criminal behavior than the circumstances into which others are born.

While those with this vision tend to regard those circumstances as economic or social, the same injustice — as viewed from the same cosmic perspective — is involved when people are born into cultural circumstances that are more likely to lead them into crime. Yet, far from taking on the daunting task of trying to change cultures or subcultures, many of the intelligentsia are adherents of the multicultural ideology, according to which cultures are all on a plane of equality, so that trying to change some cultures would be an unwarranted intrusion, cultural imperialism as it were.

Like so many other nice-sounding notions, the multicultural ideology does not distinguish between an arbitrary definition and a verifiable proposition. That is, it does not distinguish between how one chooses to use words within one’s own mind and the empirical validity of those words outside in the real world. Yet consequences, for both individuals and society, follow from mundane facts in the real world, not from definitions inside people’s heads. Empirically, the question whether or not cultures are equal becomes: Equal in what demonstrable way? That question is seldom, if ever, asked, much less answered, by most of the intelligentsia.

In addition to claims that crime can be reduced by getting at its supposed “root causes,” many among the intelligentsia also advocate “rehabilitation” of criminals, “anger management” and other therapeutic approaches to reducing crime — not simply as a supplement to traditional imprisonment but as a substitute. Like other “alternatives to incarceration,” these are not treated as hypotheses to be tested but as axioms to be defended. No matter how high the rate of recidivism among those who have been through “rehabilitation” programs or how much violence continues to be committed by those who have been in the “anger management” programs, these notions are never considered to be refuted. Between the suppression of evidence by officials and its evasion through verbal virtuosity of the intelligentsia, these theories can seldom be defeated by mere facts.

By the same token, none of the traditional methods of crime control that have been supplanted by newer and more fashionable methods can be resurrected on the basis of factual evidence. The very mention of “Victorian” ideas about society in general, or crime control in particular, is virtually guaranteed to evoke a sneer from the intelligentsia. The fact that the Victorian era was one of a decades-long decline in alcoholism, crime, and social pathology in general, both in Britain and in the United States — in contrast to more modern ideas with the opposite results in both countries — carries virtually no weight among the intelligentsia, and such facts remain largely unknown among those in the general public who depend on either the media or academia for information.

The fact that ordinary, common sense measures against crime are effective remains a matter of surprise among many of the intelligentsia. After decades of controversy over ways of reducing crime, in 2009 such news rated a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Homicides Plummet as Police Flood Tough Areas.” The account began: San Francisco’s homicide total for the first half of 2009 hit a nine-year low — falling more than 50 percent from last year — a drop that police officials attribute to flooding high-crime areas with officers and focusing on the handful of people who commit most of the crimes.”

A few intellectuals — James Q. Wilson being the most prominent — have bucked the tide when it comes to crime, but most of their work consists of showing what is wrong with the work of the far more numerous intellectuals whose theories of crime and prescriptions for crime control have been pervasive and have, in practice, led only to rising crime rates. The net cost of intellectuals to society as regards crime would include not only the vast sums of money lost by the general public — greatly exceeding the cost of keeping criminals behind bars — but also the impact of policies based on intellectuals’ theories on the lives of ordinary citizens, demoralized by fear, brutalized by violence, or cut short by criminals or rioters. If it were possible to quantify the cost of turning the theories of the intellectuals into the law of the land, the total cost would undoubtedly be enormous, just as regards crime.

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The idea of banning not only all firearms but all means of self-defense from the general population and then turning all of the criminals loose to go out and plunder is just a bit shocking. That sounds evil. I would say that God, in his infinite wisdom, gave essentially all creatures some means of self-defense. To deprive a person of all self-defense seems Orwellian to me. That is the kind of thing you can expect when you abandon Christianity — which is, I would say, what has happened with the British intelligentsia.

I have long had the sneaking suspicion that the fountainhead of all of this liberal foolishness that has so overtaken the western world is England.

26 Jan 2024