Early in his time as Prime Minister, Tony Blair said that he intended to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. It sounded really good at the time. We are not concerned here with his penchant for sound bites, however, nor whether he actually was tough on both of his targets, but on the nature of his targets.
Although there can be problems of definition, we do have an idea of what constitutes crime, and it is possible to gather figures, which can be collected and compared for trends. It is also relatively easy to be tough on crime, for example by passing legislation to lock up those convicted for longer periods than before. But can we be sure what causes crime?
If a drug user steals from a shop to sell the stolen goods to buy drugs to feed his habit, there are immediately multiple possible causes of crime. There is the drug habit which drives the offender on, caused by those who introduced the offender to drugs and sustained by the pushers who sell them. There is the willingness of the offender to overcome any morals he has been taught about the wrongness of stealing and its impact on victims for the sake of his habit. There is the accessibility of goods to steal, laid out attractively to tempt shoppers. There is the penal system which has failed to dissuade the offender from offending through its deterrents. There is the collaboration of the people who buy stolen goods and act as middle men in passing them on. There is the morality of society as a whole, which is sufficiently tolerant of drug-taking for it to be normal behaviour for a substantial minority.
During today there will have been thousands of offences of this sort, each the result of complex patterns of pressures on the key players – the offenders, those who tolerate or connive at their offending, their victims, those dealing with offending, and the wider society.
One of the problems in trying to identify the causes of certain behaviours such as offending is that it is sometimes unclear whether there is a causative link or simply an association. In the poorer parts of our cities there are multiple problems – unstable partnerships, bad housing, unemployment, school avoidance, poor attainments, high levels of offending, lower life expectancy, higher numbers of people with disabilities, more alcoholism and drug-taking. It can be hard to determine whether one specific problem leads to another, but certainly mainly people have an accumulation of such problems.
In an ideal world we would identify the root cause and deal with it, but is it possible to identify precise causes? If not, how can we ever claim to deal with the causes of crime?
Recent research has shown that children in single parent families do less well than children in families where there are both parents. The Conservative Party has proposed a policy which encourages people to marry and remain married. If there were a simple causative relationship between marriage and the successful upbringing of children, that would make sense, but the link is shaky. Would current single parents bring up their children better if forced or encouraged to remain with partners in unhappy relationships? What if it is the personalities of the single parents which leads to them failing both in their relationships with partners and as parents? And what about those single parents who are very successful in bringing up their children – where do they fit in?
The Conservatives point out the high percentage of people in prison who were children in care. Clearly the care system failed to prevent them becoming adult offenders, but is it responsible for their being offenders as adults? Would you not expect a high proportion of those who offend to have suffered the sort of family problems which led to their need for state care as children? How do you take into account improvements in behaviour which fall short of preventing all offending?
Understanding what causes behaviour is extremely complex, and the answers will also be complex. Multiple responses are needed to prevent offending – making it less possible, deterring offenders, explaining to offenders how much harm they do to victims, taking some who pose a real threat to others out of circulation, and so on. We need to act on all these points.
One line we should not ignore, though, is to focus less on the offending and more on fostering good ways of living. For years, youth work has been underfunded. Simply giving bored children ASBOs is not the answer. Occupying them creatively will help them develop and reduce their offending at the same time. The current emphasis on play is really good news in this respect.
One of the problems about justifying preventative work is that it is often hard to see what has been prevented. Nonetheless, emphasising the positives seems to us far preferable to simply targeting offending. Certainly there will be offending which – and specific offenders who – need to be targeted. But if society is functioning happily and healthily, they should be the exceptions. In medicine it is preferable to encourage healthy life styles rather than using expensive treatment programmes to deal with ailments which could have been avoided. The same is true of social health.