Oracle wrote:
This is why I described it as a sickness. You have compared like for like yet one society breeds criminals and the other does not (extrapolate comparison to US).
So what is it that gives rise to these criminals in the first place?
Genetics?
We know there is a gene which predisposes violent tendencies (has been used as a defence I believe in the US by someone on death-row).
Environment?
Poverty doesn't immediately yield crime. But capitalism mixed with deprivation probably does.
It is not genetics. This "gene" sounds like incomplete or junk science. It is like the claim that most people with so called alcoholism were more likely to have a certain gene, but this did not mean it was a gene that cause so called alcoholism....and for that matter which definition of alcoholism was even used for the criteria.
There may be a connection between a certain gene and the risk may be higher because the gene makes them have a slightly greater predisposition to abuse alcohol if they drink, but for every person with that gene that abused alcohol, there are probably ten with that same gege that drink and don't abuse alcohol.
There is no known genetic cause violence that I have ever heard of. Now there may be one study that claims it, but once again, like with the so called alcoholism gene, it might just be an indication of risk and create a slightly higher predisposition towards resulting to violence.
Environment? Yes, environment is one of the biggest factors.
The violent crime seems to be the worst in inner city poor neighborhoods and in those same neighborhoods there is still a high lead exposure rate. A good portion of children exposed to high levels of lead when growing up have shown a higher propensity to have less impulse control. So therefore the number of youths that are violent is higher.
Poverty also has anotehr environmental effect in that it breeds desperation and this is an impetus to crime. And it also helps to foment a culture of crime which perpetuates with the next generation in that community or area.
Then there is the lack of education which is yet another environmental effect. It is also a result of the poverty as well as the cause of the poverty in many cases causing a vicious cycle. They have done studies where the number of people in jail that have limited education are the vast majority of inmates and the ones with a High School diploma or higher are in the minority. Among the inmates the ones with some college is small, and the ones with degrees is smaller and the ones with advanced degreees is minute.
Now one could argue that the people that are not capable or not intelligent enough are the ones committing the crime is all that means, but there are other studies of inmates that came back to prison after release (called recidivism) that did not get any education in prison while there and they compared this to the recidivism rate for those that recieved some vocational training, a high school diploma, or even a college degree.
The recidivism rate for most inmates released was over 60% within three years, but for the ones that worked on and recieved a college degree (even a two year degree) while in prison or while on parole was only
15%.
So even though you cannot educate everyone in prison because a good portion are not up to that level of intelligence, we can still save the majority by some form of rehabilitation be it job training or college education. With job skills they are more likely to work when released earning a living making them less poor or no longer living in poverty and therefore less likely to be desperate enough to return to a life of crime. They may live in the same neighborhoods setting an example of less crime and more work ethics to the next generation changing the culture of crime to something opposite for the next generation.
Also, if the majority of released inmates do not commit more crimes instead of the other way around, then that frees up more law enforcement to catch the worst of the worst and put them away for the rest of their life.
And we should legalize/decriminalize drugs here. One of the impetuses for violent crime culture is the lure of big profits in the drug trade. We remove the profit and it stops feeding the crime culture. We can worry about the addicts and deal with them seperately, but if we eliminate the lure of drug dealing we might have a chance to prevent the next generation from becoming violent crime rectruits.
