When we talk about "crime", it's usually assumed that we all know what we're talking about, but it's also worthwhile reminding ourselves: what do we mean when we talk about "crime"?
"Crime" is the breaking of accepted social rules; or more exactly, the rules that government (and society) has defined as there to protect individuals. In this sense, "criminals" are also, by definition, anti-social i.e. against society and social rules. Crime is an anti-social act.
From a psychological point of view, this explains why psychopaths (who have Anti-Social Personality Disorder) may be responsible for a great deal of society's crime. There is an inherent aspect of individualism (which we could also call Narcissism) in the criminal act, for it means that the perpetrator wishes to do something knowing this is against the inherent rules of society. So, by seeing "crime" as the ultimate expression of malignant narcissism, this helps explain - from a psychological point of view - what is really going on. The individual wants to - if even for a fleeting moment - feel omnipotent. The question is: why does this happen? The "social" aspect of crime is something this article wants to look at in more detail.
The worst crime of all
A casual look through history books tells us that the history of mankind is also a history of violence. The nature of war means that for a "war" to be declared, someone in authority (i.e. an individual) must make that decision.
"War" is surely the most extreme form of violence one individual can cause: a person in supreme authority has immense social responsibility towards his subjects; equally, given his whim, he can use that authority to cause unparalleled violence. While in modern international law, wars are "illegal" if they are not officially declared, this really makes little difference to the victims. The effect is the same: they are dead in either case. A brief look at the history of wars since the establishment of the ICC tells us that few individuals responsible for the worst violence are ever brought to justice. So the idea that war is somehow more "humane" today than it was a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago is (in many cases) a fallacy - for proof, look no further than the brutal wars that have been carried out in the Congo in the last twenty years, or (most obviously) by ISIS in the present day. Today's wars are carried out overwhelmingly in the "developing world", and these wars differ little in their moral conduct than they did millennia ago.
So "war" can be seen as the most anti-social act of malignant narcissism possible; the expression of an all-powerful individual's will on a population. The idea is that to this warmonger, the nation in question has somehow "offended" him. As wars are about territory or security, it follows that the ruler's brittle and insecure ego is where the desire for war comes from - in other words, narcissism. When we look at the events that led to the First World War, it has often been said that one of the main reasons for it spiralling out of control was due to the psychology of those in authority, such as Kaiser Wilhelm II. A look at history's most famous rulers - from Alexander The Great, through to Genghis Khan, to England's own Henry VIII and Cambodia's Pol Pot, is a look into the psychology of psychopaths and narcissists. History isn't just made by the victors; it's also made by the psychopaths. A look at the life of Stalin is an education in psychopathy.
A social history of crime
As said earlier, if "war" is the most anti-social act possible, then an individual's desire to commit crime is that same psychology on a more localised scale.
It's impossible to understand the motivations behind crime without looking at its social context. It's also impossible to do this without understanding how human society has changed, and also (in the modern day) how human societies change from one part of the world to another, and thus, how the level of crime changes.
It has been noted by researchers that Rhesus monkeys, when in captivity, exhibit greater levels of stress (and therefore violence, and sexual violence) than in the wild. Mankind progressed from being hunter-gatherers to settled agrarians thousands of years ago; this also resulted in people living permanently in close proximity with each other for the first time in their history. Not long after this, cities developed, and cities then built walls. Why? The reason for the walls was simple: war.
As we have seen, war is the ultimate expression of a ruler's will on a population; in the same way that Rhesus monkey's will fight for status and territory when forced to live in captivity, it seems that rulers of cities felt the need to fight war for status and territory; perhaps violence (and therefore "war") was a form of stress relief, which also served as useful for the city's male population.
In the ancient world, judging from records of official tablets, "crime" seems to have been a comparative rarity compared to more recent centuries. What we would today call "community spirit" might also have something to do with it. Individualism in the modern sense of the term is - hence the phrase - a modern concept (more in this later). Ancient societies seem to have been much more minded on each other than themselves. Religion probably had a large part to play in this, in that when cities had their own gods, they all (even the ruler) felt subservient to a higher (or wider?) purpose. To put it in another way, these ancient societies were less focused on "material life" (the "here-and-now"); life was fleeting in any case due to short life expectancy, so it makes sense that people were more interested in their community as a whole, and also why the men were willing to go to war to defend it.
This also explains why, to modern eyes, this ancient mindset might seem extremely narrow-minded and ignorant; to the city's inhabitants, travel was difficult (even unthinkable due to social obligations) and daily life was about survival and planning for the next winter; thinking beyond that was pointless. So in this sense, "crime" was probably socially-unthinkable in these kinds of small communities as the effect on the criminal (and the city) would be socially-devastating.
This social analysis of crime probably rang true for most of the world until the nature of society began to change. Criminals were still considered something of a social aberration (and thus a source of entertainment when they were hanged); due to comparative difficulty in travel (e.g. with serfdom being widespread), foreigners a source of curiosity and mirth. A community's experience of "crime" would more than likely be through war than through personal experience: someone living in what is now Germany during the Thirty Years War would have had an endlessly-traumatic experience with "crime". But for many people, very little of any significance would happen in their community throughout their life. In many ways, their community was their life.
Society changes the rules
As we know, the human population of the world remained generally static, until it began to rise sharply with the onset of industrialisation and a growth in cities. The nature and frequency of crime seems to have seen a change around the same period.
To be fair, there had been some social changes in many countries prior to industrialisation, such as a relative decline in the role of religion and the rise of the scientific method in the 18th century in the West; some cities, such as London, grew noticably. With this came a gradual shift of culture, towards the individual.
But these were gradual changes. Industrialisation made living in cities and towns necessary for the new economic opportunities of industry to be taken advantage of, and it is this which makes fundamental changes to society.
Industrialisation gave new opportunities for movement of labour and capital; something which had been very difficult in an agrarian society based on static communities. In other words, for people to be successful in this new economy, they had to act more like individuals. It is therefore possible to identify the rapid growth in cities and changes to society as a factor that helps explain the higher frequency of crime; in particular, violence and sex crime. When this social change forced people to act more like individuals, the result was also a rise in crime.
We have already discussed how Rhesus monkeys react badly to captivity. In an insecure and uncomfortable social environment, such as in socially-cramped industrial cities, humans can react in much the same way.
The growth of industrialisation to different parts of the world has often seen much the same trend; a concurrent rise in crime, for the reasons mentioned above. Where this differs from country to country depends on the social structure. Obviously, not all industrialised countries have the same rates of crime: compare, for example, Japan and the USA, or China and Russia.
For the other factor that also seems to be important indicator of crime levels is the extent of what we might call "community spirit". As mentioned before, the "community spirit" that seems to have been a strong element of ancient cultures was a strong indicator of a "pro-social" environment where crime was almost morally-unthinkable. This was probably because those communities were extremely closely-knit and shared a high level of empathy due to their shared experiences, and therefore naturally looked out for each other. In other words, we could call this an ancient form of "crime prevention"!
Scandinavia is industrialised but has low crime levels because its society does not seem to suffer from the "dislocation" that is typical in most industrialised societies. This "dislocation" (or "social alienation") usually comes about through the nature of work: individuals forced to leave their families to get work in the city, for example. This situation is worsened by other factors such as lack of strong government institutions (e.g. a welfare state), which perpetuate higher levels of inequality, and a lack of a family support unit, feeding into the malignant narcissism that can gestate in an individual. When there is no-one there who seems to be there to support you, it takes little for an individual to resort to crime to get what they want.
The key to the problem is one of instability: when a society becomes unstable due to social or economic factors, this seems to breed crime. The complexities that modern industrialised society brings simply compounds that. Countries such as South Africa have extremely high levels of crime partly because of the lack of strong government institutions, gross inequality, and weak family connections. All the devices which can were used as a social form of "crime prevention" - as they were in pre-industrial, traditional societies - are not there. This can also be said (to an extent) of the UK, when comparing crime rates to those of other European countries such as Germany. Scandinavia seems to have few of these problems because of a strong social fabric from both government, the family, and society in general.
In this way, a study of the history of crime is also a study of social change: from traditional, closely-knit societies of the pre-Enlightenment (and pre-Industrial) age to more individualistic and fractured societies that came about through Industrialisation. From a psychological point of view, human society became more self-centred, but also dissatisfied, as it took itself further from its roots.
This social tension is not surprising, given the relatively short time that has passed; our minds have yet to adapt to the fact that we are not hunter-gatherers, and in spite of the advances made in technology and insight, our instincts are fundamentally unchanged. This explains why war is still fought because of the same basic drives for security and territory. At the individual level, this "instinct" explains why some people's desire for individualism (i.e. selfishness) crosses the line into criminal behaviour; they have been unable to discipline these instincts in the setting of the modern city. Like the Rhesus monkeys, they feel both trapped and frustrated by their "urban zoo", and are unable to restrain their urges.
This explains why urban life is more dangerous than country life, and why conservative societies in the modern world tend to have less crime: not because liberal societies are "more permissive" (and therefore "worse", as the reactionary right believe), but simply because what some would call "conservative" culture is also usually community-based rather than individualistic. Small-town and village life is safer because people are more likely to know their neighbours and look out for one another; while city-dwellers might mock this as an insular perspective, it is also fundamentally a more socially-protective one, too, which goes back millennia.
Yet this also raises one of the odd (and fundamental?) contradictions in modern conservatism's embrace of neo-liberalism. Because conservatism is meant to be about "communitarian" values (i.e. about what's best for the family, village, nation etc.), how does the "individualist" spirit of modern economics fit into this? It feels like a square peg in a round hole. No wonder societies like the USA and UK which embrace this contradiction have such social issues. Those nations that have copied that same flawed socio-economic model have developed the same problems with crime: a social model that creates social instability and encourages an amoral form of individualism also increases the risk that those people will become malignant narcissists, and criminals.
In some ways, crime in the UK bears more similarites to those in Russia. As British society has become more unequal, government support less reliable, family units breaking down, working life more insecure and stressful, we can see the effects of this in the crime and violence on Britain's streets. The drugs epidemic which seems to be sweeping through the country (especially its homeless) is surely a result of this variety of social pressures. Russia has experienced the same "social pressures" (albeit in much more extreme manner) since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The same culture of casual violence, petty crime and alcoholism exists in Russia as it does in Britain; the only difference is the question of degree. It would be interesting to make a social (and crime) comparison between the post-industrial cities of Northern England with those in, say, Siberia; the similarities may well be striking.
One wonders what the Rhesus monkeys would do.
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