BARRY MacKenzie’s expressive simile “”dry as a crow’s armpit” jumped to mind last week as I skipped through the Centre for Independent Studies’ latest publication: The Economic Theory of Crime.
“”Dries” were those left over after Mrs Thatcher had wrung all the “”wets” from her Cabinet. Now the are on the retreat as politicians have discovered voters like a little humanity. It was therefore refreshing to discover that some people are still able to propound such unremittingly dry theories as The Economic Theory of Crime. It subjects crime to the rigours of economic cost-benefit analysis with graphs of supply and demand and comes up with some intelligent debunking of the no-fault theories that blame crime on society, upbringing, pathological compulsion and anything else other than the criminals deliberate decision to engage in crime.
Cathy Buchanan and Peter Hartley, in their economic theory, say the vast bulk of crime is done by criminals who rationally decide to pursue that career rather than other employment because it is easier and more profitable and the risks in it do not outweigh those benefits. It flows from this that the best way to cut crime is to increase penalties and increase the likelihood of being caught. That theory would normally be ho-hum, bring-back-the-birch stuff. However, the authors go well beyond the ho-hum into some new territory.
First, they point out, with fairly vigorous statistical work, that crime is rising, so is policing and the cost of it and penalties are falling. So present policies are not working. Moreover, they say, most of the present theories about what causes criminality don’t fit. An obvious point is that all of the surveys on criminals only include criminals who were caught; those who haven’t be caught are not branded “”criminal” and are not around to be surveyed as “”criminals”. Moreover, surveying people in jail and concluding that they are more likely to the under-educated, socially inept and having horrible family backgrounds is not a ground for discounting the economic theory. Those factors usually mean they are less employable and therefore find crime more attractive economically than a low-paid menial job, or no job at all because they have been priced out of the market by too-high award rates.
The great strength of this little monograph is its consistency and absence of moralising. The authors do not want to lock crims up for longer; that costs more. They prefer fines, restitution, community-service orders and restrictions through electronic surveillance.
They express dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of police. For a start they waste too much time on victimless crimes (enforcing morality), instead of protecting person and property. Drug and prostitution prohibitions just create more crime, they argue; they don’t prevent it.
To increase the chance of getting caught police should be redirected away from victimless crimes. They should also have wider powers of arrest, questioning and search. Further more private policing would bring some competition. They argue that police are paid no matter what percentage of crime is cleared up. Private security companies, hired by a community, would be fired if they were not effective.
The authors dismiss half a dozen wet theories about criminals: that they are defective from birth; they have lower intelligence; they have personality defects; they are driven by social conditions; they had deprived childhoods or fractious upbringings; they are driven by the strains of modern life; or they are driven by violence on television. They prefer the theory that criminals rationally choose crime and deterrence is not high enough to make them rationally choose not to engage in crime.
There is not enough space to do their denunciation of the wet theories justice. But on the television violence theory, they said that it was thought in the last half of last century that the growth of literacy was turning boys to crime because they read crime novels. They quoted a London magistrate in 1885 as saying: “”There is not a boy or young lad in our Courts of Justice whose position there is not more or less due to the effect of this unwholesome literature upon his mind.”
The authors acknowledge that the economic theory does not explain all crime, but it is cause for more of it than the wet no-faulters would have us believe. One argument they have on their side is the obvious weakness in the effectiveness of present theories.