WITH so much unemployment about, and more to come, it seems
reasonable to fear that more crime will come with it. The devil, after all,
finds work for idle hands, and that English proverb finds echoes everywhere.
The French and the Finns say that "idleness is the
mother of all vices" (the Italians think the same, except that it's the
father); the Portuguese, that "an empty head is the devil's
workshop"; the Egyptians, that "the idle hand is impure".
Who can gainsay such an accord of folk wisdom? The US crime
statistics, for one. The big rise in US unemployment (it's going down a little
now, but it's still high at around 9%) hasn't been accompanied by a surge in
crime. The stagnation of working and middle-class incomes hasn't sent the
sufferers out onto the street in orgies of thieving or robbery with assault.
Although Americans – bamboozled by super-violent films and
TV's concentration on murder and rape – fear crime as much if not more than
ever, still the real decline in most crimes is large, and has continued.
The reasons for rises and falls in crime are always
contested, but one reason commonly cited – though not universally agreed upon –
is the high rate of incarceration in the US.
And it's not just that the US locks up people more willingly
than other countries – the UK sends about the same percentage to prison. It's
that the prisoners spend longer, often much longer, inside. Research by Steven
Levitt and William Spelman points to these sentences as reducing crime by a lot
– about one-quarter.
Other researchers say it's much less (though still
accounting for a measurable decline) and that the social effects, especially on
young black men without college degrees or even high school diplomas, who are
disproportionately incarcerated, outweigh the gains.
There are other reasons. Less cocaine is now taken, either
heavily or recreationally, than was the case a decade or more ago. Police
methods, especially forensics, have become much more sophisticated, which has
meant more arrests and more convictions.
People look after their property better. It may even be the
case that reduced levels of lead in young bloodstreams – down by four-fifths in
the past decade – have reduced crime, as high levels of lead in teenage
bloodstreams have long been linked to aggression and criminal behaviour.
Much more speculatively, it could be that our culture has
changed. James Q Wilson – the social scientist whose work on policing of
crime-ridden areas inspired shifts to no-tolerance methods, where actions that
makes neighbourhoods unsafe or just unpleasant (broken windows, graffiti) are
pursued and punished – said in his 2011 Manhattan Lecture that we have moved
from a 1960s-inspired, ultra-liberal ethos of self-expression to a more
conservative ethic of self-control.
He added, though, that no one knew how to measure the
effects of such a move, if move it was.
Like him, and with his caveat, I think culture is important,
but I also think that as culture has changed over the past half-century, so it
is likely to change again – if, that is, high levels of unemployment persist.
For the loss of jobs isn't likely to be substantially
reversed when the Western economies move into growth – even relatively high
growth. There are structural reasons why we might be stuck with terrible
situations, like 40% youth unemployment in Spain and large-scale job losses
week by week in Greece and Portugal.
Three job categories
If you divide jobs into three categories – transformational,
transactional and interactional – only the last is, and will be for a while, a
reliable supplier of well-paid and good jobs.
The first, transformational, means making cars, doing farm
work, or building houses and schools, work that is very substantially
automated, and will be further.
Transactional means work dealing with the public, as in call
centres – which have been labour intensive, and indeed have provided something
of a (low-paid) cushion against redundancies from transformational jobs – but
are now also being automated, rapidly. (There is a sub-group here that is,
according to the Economist, growing: domestic service. And while much of it
isn't very well rewarded, some of it is: a good butler can cost you £150 000 a
year.)
It's in the interactional jobs where the growth, and the
high pay, is to be found: in finance, in the law, and in some parts of the
media. These need a lot of training, and invariably at least one degree. Which
means that people who took unskilled, or low-skilled – or some kinds of skilled
– work now face a tough market. And that greatly exacerbates the gap between
the have-a-lots and the have-littles, even for those with work (which is still
most of us).
Long-term, chronic unemployment for young men with few
prospects and little shape to their lives strikes me as a big challenge to a
trend of declining crime. This is even more the case because criminality in the
world – especially in organised-crime gangs and in corruption networks – isn't
declining: indeed, globally it's leaping ahead.
Stuart Gilman, an expert on corrupt practices (as an
investigator, not a participant) told me that there are quite a few
"kleptocracies" in the world and that "though we can stop some
of it, I'm always surprised at how smart the criminals are.
"They are always one step ahead. Once you strip off the
veil of legitimate marketplaces, it's amazing what, in so many places, is
underneath."
One of the Wikileaks documents that circulated in December
2010 was a cable from the US ambassador to Moscow, John Beyrle, to the effect
that corruption is the system. Gilman says that there is no easy line to draw
between corruption, organised crime and terrorism – all can merge into one
other.
Networks of crime, corruption and terrorism hold out to the
disenfranchised young the rewards of status, money and a kind of respect (also,
of course, risks of pain, imprisonment and death).
States that have been able to keep these networks out, or at
any rate down, face a tougher struggle in doing so than before: globalisation
works for crime too, even if slowly (mafias can and do migrate, but tend to
stick to their own national turf).
But within these cultures, look at the "success"
of organised crime gangs in Italy (now spreading to the north from the south);
in Russia, burgeoning over the past 20 years; in Mexico, where the drug gangs
can terrorise whole regions and account for more violent deaths of nosy
journalists than anywhere else in the world; in China, where, as in Russia, a
softening of tyrannical rule meant a big spike in crime; in India, where gangs
flourish, violent crime has risen fast in the past half-century (by over 200%,
for murders), and where corruption, too, is a way of government and much
commercial life.
The power these criminal subcultures have – apart from the
considerable ability to acquire vast sums of money, terrorise their victims and
even cow (or penetrate) governments – is to lower the defences the young have
against involvement with them.
It's what happened in the US and elsewhere in the 1920s and
1930s, when a reserve army of young labour provided foot soldiers for crime
mobs. A sense of hope betrayed by economies that cannot meet the needs of
employment could do the same – on a larger, more global scale.
- Reuters
* John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study
of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is director of journalism.