Take Control

But pervasive fear of crime changes you. It changed the United States from a nation that believed in second chances, to one that wanted to lock criminals up and throw away the key. We didn’t change our minds again until crime had fallen significantly.
Megan McArdle, Opinion: Street crime has distorted our politics before. If we don’t get it under control, it will do so again.

I wonder, if the United States had remained "a nation that believed in second chances," would there have been so much incentive for crime? Ms. McArdle's column struck me as having the moralistic view of crime that I suspect that many people in the United States share. Rather than being a rational response to the perception, if not always the reality, of limited legitimate opportunity to advance, crime is seen as a form of willful perversity, an easy way of getting ahead in life that comes with none of the work or effort that honest labor demands.

For my own part, I suspect that a program that seeks to reduce the incidence of crime by expecting people to quietly endure grinding poverty until such time as someone decides to throw them a bone is doomed to failure. But I think that the ethos of control that many people favor is an artifact of the moral distance that Americans tend to see between one another. With a little dash of the opinion that viable opportunities for success are free for the asking thrown in.

It's an interesting dichotomy, and the sort of thing that can only manifest itself across large bodies of people; American society comes across as simultaneously understanding material success to be rare and resources scarce, yet the opportunities for wealth and advancement to be boundless. (Although, I should note that the practice of "opportunity hoarding" is certainly a thing, so perhaps Americans don't believe that opportunities are as readily available as one might think...)

Also worth pointing out is that when people talk about "fear of crime" they often speak of in-person crimes, like assault, robbery or murder. Bernard Madoff used his Ponzi scheme to fleece investors for billions of dollars; despite such scams ruining lives on a daily basis, it's the young man who knocks over a 7-11 for a couple hundred dollars or breaks into a car that fuels the public's worries. And if people are more afraid of the sorts of crimes that the indigent are more likely to commit, perhaps one should expect an inclination to see it as indicative of the perpetrator's intrinsic moral decay.

It occurs to me that talk of getting "our streets back under control" is a plea to exercise power, and in a particular way. Forcing conformity to a set of social rules that people understand work to their disadvantage is only practical when a society has the ability to make the costs of breaking those rules even more of a disadvantage. This is where the perceived poverty of a society as a whole rears its head; the aggressive wielding of the stick seen as more cost effective than proffering carrots. Second chances are too expensive to be given freely, while long terms of incarceration, and the informal punishments that continue after release, are seen as cheap solutions.

I know that I harp on this conclusion; perhaps I should seek to do something substantial with it, or just let it go, but for all that the United States is constantly described as a rich nation, I don't see that reflected in the way people behave. And from that, I infer that Americans don't perceive themselves as being particularly well-off. Sure, they understand that Latin America is poor, and that's why migrants come North in the tens of thousands, but there is also an understanding that too many migrants will simply render the United States just as poverty-stricken as Mexico, despite the fact that the United States has 7 times the per-capita GDP of its southern neighbor.

I'm not a world traveler by any stretch, but I have been overseas a couple of times, and it surprises me that I've been to countries with substantially lower per-capita GDP than the United States, but they seemed to see themselves as better off than many Americans do. There may be something to be said for a nagging fear that the wolf is at the door to inspire hard work, but fear makes the wolf appear larger, too. At it's core, Ms. McArdle's thesis is a simple one. People can be controlled. Their fears cannot be.