Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [281]
Crime, supposedly, does not pay; but this is not obvious to the naked eye. Many crimes, in fact, look like they do pay—and quickly, too. Drug dealing is one; robbery is another. Theft produces money which, if not effortless, is at least not earned by hard work in the usual sense. Theft is a way for young kids (males, almost exclusively) to make quick money, instant money. In 1990, a group of young men in New York tried to rob a family of tourists from Utah; in the scuffle that followed, they killed one family member, a twenty-two year-old man, who was trying to protect his mother. The point of the crime was to get money to go dancing. Which is exactly what they did after the crime. They went dancing.13
The twentieth-century world is, after all, the world of mass media. It is the world of radio, the movies, and, most strikingly, TV. It is self-centered, fast, glitzy, a world of instant communication. Crime in the United States (and elsewhere in the West) may be, in a sense, the price society pays for an open society, a mass-communication society, a society that stresses individualism and choice.14 The outburst of crime in the twentieth century tracks, suspiciously, the apparent shift at the margin that Susman and Bell have noticed: away from emphasis on self-control, toward emphasis on expressive individualism. The effect on criminal justice is pervasive. It is certainly not all bad. It has paved the way, for example, to reform in crimes of morality, to a decrease in legally-enforced repression; we have noted its impact at many points in preceding chapters.
Cultural and personality change has an impact on crime and criminal justice that goes beyond the examples mentioned. For one thing, the culture simply does not encourage people to be modest, self-effacing, to submerge their egos, to sacrifice their personal desires on the altar of some higher cause. The culture exalts the self. It exalts personal success. But not everybody can have success, however you define it. There are millions of failed, stunted, poverty-stricken selves. Many of these are people who cannot swallow failure.
Failure, like success, is culturally and psychologically defined. In the nineteenth century, a poor but “respectable” person was presumably no failure. An immigrant dishwasher, escaped from some war-torn, starving country, may think of himself, or herself, lucky to be alive, lucky to be working, lucky to be on the way to a better life. A middle-class American would regard this job and this life as absolute failure. A sense of failure can breed radical discontent; in some instances, crime. At least this seems plausible. In any event, crime may seem like a better or easier way to “get paid,” to lay in a stock of gratification, than any of the obvious alternatives. Education, professional training, talent, and skill pay off; but not everybody can even dream of going these routes, and poverty weighs the swimmer down with stones. For truncated, dead-end lives, lives at the bottom of the barrel, there seems to be no real alternative to crime, except low-paid, low-status jobs (if you can get them). When the choice is between selling hamburgers at McDonald’s for minimum wage and running errands for drug dealers or stealing, the illegal options may seem a lot more attractive. The temptations are great—in this culture.
“Crime” is a label attached to certain ways people act; but people are trained, or socialized, as children how to think and how to act and how to feel. We can reject the idea of born criminals without rejecting the idea that crime begins, as it were, in the cradle;