Crime and Punishment

The Met going after watch-snatchers shows how easy cracking down on crime can be. A safer, crime-free future is possible – we just need the will to realise it.

Last week I saw news of something of exceeding rarity: the Metropolitan Police doing something useful. The Met’s Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley proudly took to the airwaves to announce that 21 men were now behind bars thanks to an operation by undercover officers to catch would-be watch thieves. Officers identified areas that had become crime hotspots, sending in a plain-clothed officer as bait for the roaming criminals, who were then pounced upon once they attempted to snatch the officer’s watch by a band of his colleagues who had been surreptitiously following from the shadows. A video compilation of the arrests was circulated by the Met and makes for rather enjoyable viewing.

The success of this operation further entrenched my long-standing belief that massively reducing crime in this country would be comically easy. In fact, I believe that certain crimes, such as watch thefts, burglaries, robberies, knife crime, and so on, could be virtually eliminated in the space of a few years. This may sound like the ludicrous hubris of someone with no background in the field, and perhaps it is, but a society in which such crimes are an overwhelming rarity is not merely an unachievable utopian dream. Such societies already exist and can be experienced if one were to visit places such as Japan, Singapore, South Korea, or even certain parts of Central and Eastern Europe.

I’m overcome by intense pangs of jealousy when I see that in places such as Singapore, it is common to leave items as expensive as electric bikes completely unattended and unlocked, such is the low incidence of crime there. But it is also a cause for optimism, and my belief that such low crime rates could be replicated in Britain rests on two key insights: first, that the vast majority of crime is committed by a small minority of the population, and second, that in the form of prisons we have the means by which to incapacitate this criminal minority.

This article by Inquisitive Bird summarises the strong empirical data that shows how a small number of criminals commit a large proportion of all crime. He shows that the power laws that dominate a range of facets of human life,  and mean that a small number of people will be responsible for a large proportion of any given phenomenon, apply equally to crime. The piece contains a trove of interesting data from a variety of studies, such as one that found that ‘approximately half of violent crime convictions [in Sweden] were committed by people who already had 3 or more violent crime convictions. In other words, if after being convicted of 3 violent crimes people were prevented from further offending, half of violent crime convictions would have been avoided.’

The high concentration of crime amongst a small minority of the population ought to be a source of relief; it means that a concerted effort to combat crime need only concern itself with this minority, rather than having to address society as a whole. Given we know that most crime is committed by a small cadre of persistent reoffenders, the question becomes how we can limit their ability to carry out their crime sprees. Luckily, we already have in place an institution that is perfectly poised to fulfil this role: prisons.

Following the 2020 Racial Reckoning, prison abolitionism gained in prominence, though happily never got very far owing to its propositions crumbling as soon as they make contact with reality. An offshoot of anarchist philosophy, abolitionism holds that carceral confinement is an intolerably inhumane form of state violence against its inmates. Being the cynic that I am, I believe that a certain amount of violence is inevitable within any society, so the question is who that violence should predominantly be instigated against: the good and the innocent at the whims of unscrupulous criminals, or would-be criminals at the hands of the state. The premise of the abolitionists, that prisons are a form of violence against the incarcerated, is correct, but unlike them I believe this to be a good thing, given the alternative.

Beyond moral objections, prisons are also denounced for supposedly ‘not working’. They are said to fail to act as a deterrent to crime, whilst high rates of recidivism are taken as proof of their failure to rehabilitate criminals. Both are mostly likely correct, as an article by Mugwump argues, with studies showing that longer prison sentences neither had a deterrent effect nor did they reduce reoffending rates. But, as the latter paper also argues, incarceration can still be justified notwithstanding these findings, since prisons still excel in their role of incapacitating criminals.

With this in mind, it seems blindingly obvious how we can effectively slash the crime rate: arrest the small number of repeat offenders and lock them up for a long time. The Met’s operation against watch thieves offers an excellent blueprint for how police forces can proactively go after criminals and scoop up a great number of them in relatively little time.  The concentrated clustering of crime means ‘that the future locations of crime should—to some extent at least—be predictable’, so an efficient allocation of police resources based on existing crime data would effectively target repeat offenders. Police forces already have the resources, they just currently allocate them to ridiculously trivial matters, such as prosecuting autistic teenagers for posting ‘offensive’ lyrics on Instagram (I know, I know, very much low-hanging fruit here).

The long-term incarceration of hundreds of thousands of people will not come cheap, especially given how many more prisons will need to be built to accommodate them. But the incredibly high cost of crime means doing so would pay for itself, not to speak of the psychological boost living in a low-crime society would provide. It will also mean that many of the heinous and tragic crimes compiled in this depressing thread would be confined to the past, as individuals on a clear path of criminal escalation are quarantined before they are able to seriously hurt someone, or worse.

Only then, when the violent and malevolent are confined from the good and law-abiding, when it will become commonplace to leave expensive bikes unlocked and laptops unattended, will we have become a truly civilised society.