Good Crime?

Imagine the scenario: It’s this time next year and following a recent spate of gang related stabbings across London, question time in the House of Commons is the focus of fervid media attention.

A Commons member, allied to the moderate left, is addressing the House and expressing his shock at a recently published article by a renowned but controversial academic. The article states that the apparent moral panic is disproportionate to the crimes, and that the criminal incidents in question are not only to be expected, but are actually ‘good’ and even ‘healthy’ for society.

The Rt. Honourable Gentleman is claiming, with some justification, that the article is insensitive and an insult to members of his constituency, particularly those who themselves have been victims of violent crime. His claim is met with widespread endorsement. Even sections of the liberal and left wing press express an element of disdain at the academics asseveration.

Now try to imagine the degree of outrage and controversy the academic’s statements might have encountered if they had occurred over a hundred years ago, and that this is not London but Paris, France, a country that only abolished serfdom - a form of land owned peasantry, no different to slave labour - just forty years before.

Bear in mind that France, like most of Europe in the late 19th century, still had lynch laws and kangaroo courts, particularly in rural areas. Here, crimes as petty as blasphemy, swearing and even sloth were met with public humiliation, such as flogging and tarring and feathering.

Even today it would be difficult to find support for the academic’s comments, but in the late 19th century, attitudes to crime were still seen to be sacrilegious, as law was still seen to be ‘Gods Law’. The academic would have had few sympathisers in 1898.

That academic in question was Emile Durkheim, who held the belief that crime pushes the moral boundaries of the collective conscience of society and forces society to change, and subsequently, grow. He argued that crime is necessary in order to change what is acceptably wrong, immoral, and dysfunctional in society.

For example, the suffragettes were committing criminal acts and so would therefore challenge a lack of morality – which was a basic civil right to vote. The ANC, on the other hand, took to crime in order to have an immoral law (apartheid) abolished.

Both the suffragettes and the ANC committed acts of crime that challenged the moral boundaries and so changed the collective conscience of their respective societies, which was necessary in order to achieve what is perceived by most people to be a morally appropriate social change, enhancing the healthy growth of society in the process.

So what about the ‘spate of knife crime’ in our imaginary scenario? Well, neither teenage violence nor knife crime is new to society and both have been on a steady decrease since 1992 and 1986 respectively. This is due in part to social welfare organisations, for example Youth Offending Teams (Y.O.T’s), having learned valuable lessons from previous generations of juvenile delinquency, such as football hooligans of the late 1970’s and 80’s who. Despite being not only more prevalent, but also more violent than any of their predecessors of young offenders, the football hooligans contradicted all the stereotypes from history in that they were upwardly mobile, confident, flamboyant and very much a part of mainstream society. What the football hooligans of that era lacked was an emotional outlet or an emotional landing pad, which is a vital lesson in child and teenage development for today’s society. Durkheim’s theory that crime was good for society was based on what he called ‘social fact’. He dismissed all biological and psychological reasons for crime.

He also claimed that if crime was unusually high, it was solely down to weak or corrupt government, and would cause society to malfunction to the point of virtual collapse. However, if crime was unusually low, society would then adopt high moral collective sentiments, meaning that even minor behaviour defects, such as impoliteness, would then become an unacceptable breach to the moral value. The outcome being that society would stagnate, forcing the condition of anomie, resulting in an unusually high number of suicides.

Countries with unusually low crime rates today – Sweden, Finland, Japan, Lithuania, and China, for example – have above average rates of suicide, China’s being alarmingly high with 49% of the worlds suicides, yet only 19.4% of the worlds population.

According to Durkheim, if society crushes the individual mind of the criminal, it will crush the individual mind of the genius.

Crime, to a certain extent, is therefore necessary, healthy and good for society.

Kevin Henaghan