Hans von Hentig said this in 1947, “Human beings are not made to resist lightning bolts,” “we must acknowledge similar configurations of our cultural life when extreme want, extreme provocation, or extreme frustration wrings an unlawful act from an otherwise law-abiding individual. Most of our criminals are milieu-made. They are law-abiding while the sun shines, while economic life goes on undisturbed, and their ability of adjustment id not taxed excessively. When social storms are brewing, depressions set in, prices tumble, and the army of unemployed swells, the average law-abiding individual yields to extreme pressure and becomes a law-breaker.”
Whether we speak of the USA, UK, Australia, Japan, or other developed nations, the dramatic contraction in consumer and business spending has now hit the markets for a second round of pain; it was not so long ago that we suffered the first round with the credit contraction following the Lehman Brothers collapse. Now we must consider more grave consequences and move to mitigate these risks.But is is not just the developed nations that must be concerned, China and other Rest Of World nations are also confronting serious contractions of their economies. China's economy has slowed down more rapidly than many other locations, and with 1.3 billion population the sharp contraction if prolonged may create crime opportunity difficult to thwart.
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It is time for governments to consider how best to manage the next phase of this crisis -- the phase where we realize that the stimulus, government financial interventions, and coordinated efforts while important, do not bring immediate relief to individuals. In September 1974, the UN Social Defense Research Institute (Rome) called together economists and criminal justice experts to review data and lessons learned from past sharp economic contractions and crime and they found that a great contributor to crime opportunity was the unprepared states, indeed the under capacity of social control systems to hold down order during surge waves of crime; in time the social control systems respond and meet needs, but at first they are overwhelmed when much havoc can run ruin to many lives and fortunes. It is not too early to prepare.
President Obama, we need a crime control plan, and the plan needs to be as big and bold as the problems we face now, and will face in the future. It is a myth that the Great Depression saw falling crime rates requiring inaction on the part of government. On the contrary, crime was deliberately tackled by President Roosevelt through specific measures to: (1) strengthen criminal justice institutions to meet new crime needs; (2) target and incapacitate serious habitual offenders; (3) eliminate laws not obeyed by the people (exercising civil disobedience) to concentrate focus of attention on laws designed to reduce most harm; (4) take the money out of crime (and tax undesirable commerce it if possible); (5) reduce demand for crime, and more specifically provide long-term intensive employment for the most likely offenders -- unemployed young males; at one point in the Great Depression, over 25% of the young male unemployed population was working in camps in the nations state and national parks. This and many other lessons we should be reviewing now for the relevancy, and more.
