Criminals – Design A Delinquent.
The sensation-seeking media’s identikit of criminals highlight perceived laziness, fecklessness, self-induced poverty and addictons, and vulnerability to violence (as perpetrator and victim) – a cartoon cornucopia of incompetece. After the mass media, need to pander to well-heeled advertising paymasters, not those the bulk of society they’re both keen to exploit.
What of muti-selling author and peer Jeffrey Archer of England? Wherefore was heimprisoned? Surely not because because he was a criminal; men in Italian suits and leather shoes doin’t contravene society’s laws (for perjury during a 1987 defamation case he instituted ) – do they?
Or are there degrees of ‘criminality’? Was he not so much of a criminal, being titled, famous and supposedly-wealthy (he actaully owed nearly a half-billion ponds when imprisoned)? Mild lacerations (water burns, perhaps) with a sopping wet bus ticket were deemed sufficient punitive measures for such a worthy.
How about the systematic ‘creative accounting’ practices that fuelled high-flying American Enron exevutives until the dawn of the millenniun? Or the lawyers (including the bigwig’s former girlfried) involved in the antipodean Mr. Asia heroin ring of the Seventies? No laws made them criminals, intelligent hard-working qualified folk that they were.
Here In Staus-Symbol Land.
The simple fact of the matter is that it is not only broken homes, runaway addictions, ineffectual upbringing etc. to blame for crime It is also the continuous pressure modern society – and not just in Western society – places on all those of its members able to think (if not act) for themselves – pressure, to repeatedly upgrade status-symbol cars, computers, homes, to take long, luxury holidays, to put their childeren in the ‘best’ (ie. most expensive) institutions – to buy, buy, buy and spend, spend, spend.
For some, the pressure – probably felt since childhood – is too much; something cracks.
So, what does it take to make a criminal?
Before any and all other considerations, there must be the opportunity. Without that, the weakest of wills and the best-laid schemes are as naught. A relatively-open environment is, thus, also highly desirable when farming criminals. Aboard a naval vessel, for example, is pretty much out of the question; the uncommonly-long periods in very limited spaces makes the concealment and secrecy so important prior to and after a crime impractical, if not impossible.
There has never been and can never be criminals in an environment which either removes any occasion for crime or makes imminent discovery of the criminal-to-be unavoidable, Prisoners can’t be drug addicts because they aren’t given the opportunity to access any. Embezzlers aren’t going to throw away their likely-to-be-lucrative careers for a measly few hundred thousands if their work is under constant and strict scrutiny.
Big Brother? Undoubtedly. But there’s no two ways around it; it’s either him or at least some degree of criminal activity at any level of all types of society.
