Hats and tails

The victims of crime are most often of the same class as the criminals themselves

By Theodore Dalrymple

The left, said Le Monde on 31 August, has always been ill at ease with law and order. This is not quite true: the left is only ill at ease in what it calls bourgeois democracies. In people's democracies it has felt no qualms at all about order, though perhaps law is another thing.

Why this illness at ease? The left claims a special vocation to defend the helpless and the underdog, wherever he might be, and criminals are mainly drawn from the impoverished (even if nowadays impoverishment is only relative). Their homes are what, only forty years ago, would have been called broken homes - the statistically normal pattern now, at least in their social class. They are poorly educated and their economic prospects are grim. To heap punishment upon them for the 'natural' consequences of their life experiences seems cruel and unfeeling.

However, this illness at ease is not quite as generous as it might appear. In the first place, it ascribes to the criminals themselves no choice in their own behaviour, as if they were 'you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things.‘ In the second place, it makes a certain kind of person - all those with similar experiences - criminal ex officio, as it were. This is demeaning to the many who are not criminal.

Finally, it disregards the cardinally important fact that the victims of crime are most often of the same class as the criminals themselves.

It is as if politicians and intellectuals of the left lived in a mental world of The Beano, in which criminals were burglars dressed in hooped shirts and small masks, climbing down the drainpipes of well-to-do homes, with a bag marked 'Swag' over their shoulders, theft being a kind of restitution. But this is no more realistic than the image of plutocrats wearing top hats and tails.

Similarly, the left confuses and confounds, for its own ends, the prevention of criminality in the first place with what to do about it once it has developed. Of course, the deterrence of criminality by the prospect of punishment has its part to play in the former, but it is clearly not sufficient.

Underlying the left's illness at ease is the belief that until the social order is just according to its own lights, the distinction between the legal and the criminal is arbitrary or hypocritical and therefore unjust. That is why it is always dreaming of large scale or even total transformations.