Though Cowards Flinch

You have to respect someone who has devoted their whole lives to the criminal justice system, as former Lord Chief Justice Woolf has done. I watched his performance on BBC News 24 this morning. He spoke a lot about the over-crowding of the prisons and how we should be better adapted to pursue alternatives to jail. One thing, however, highlighted the fundamentally weak approach of liberals to criminal justice.

Woolf attacked Tony Blair’s pledge to be tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime. Saying that we’re tough on crime but not on the causes, Woolf made an equation between how much we’re spending on imprisoning people and how much we’re not spending on education. What sort of education, exactly, does Lord Woolf and others who think like him, will eliminate crime?

The root of the criminal justice system is individual culpability for one’s own actions. It can’t take into account how far ‘society’ may be responsible because such considerations would involve each jury measuring the extent to which any crime was a product of social circumstances. That our current social system bears some blame is pretty uncontentious, looking at the correlation between crime and poverty.

Yet education will not eliminate poverty. Even in a country where everyone goes to private schools and transfers to Oxford or Cambridge, there will still be people who are only paid whatever the market value is for collecting trash. Education will not structurally change the nature of our system, which automatically puts pressure upon wages in order to levy ever greater profit margins.

Without excusing criminals for their activities, at least some crime is in the same category as benefit fraud. Why try and get a job when the wages and conditions are piss poor? Why not ‘do the double’ since it’s the only way you’re ever likely to get extra money? On an individual basis, capitalism works, because someone can get promoted to management and earn more money, can grow in their job etc.

However at a collective level, capitalism breaks down. Regardless of how many people can move beyond being grunt employees, not everyone can do that. Indeed, if you listen to economists of both Labour and Tory stripe, a higher minimum wage than the current one would place such strain on business as to be unworkable. A ‘living wage’ is a concept which finds few allies amongst business owners.

For as long as our social and economic system remains in place, we’re always likely to have poverty and poverty drives people towards crime. It doesn’t account for all crime of course, but when the motivating goal of our entire society is accumulation of material wealth, what does one expect? Perhaps some day that will not be the case – but it’s not going to change through education.