Altruism: The Top Contributor to Crime

Criminologist Stanton Samenow disputes the fashionable notion of attributing crime to circumstances external to the criminal.

For example, in one case, he asks the kinds of questions that many people who buy that idea would call "racist" or "rude," and that might not even occur to many people to ask:

Image by Maxim Hopman, via Unsplash, license.

Unanticipated setbacks and hardship have been regarded as critically important to "pushing over the edge" into crime people who have been law-abiding throughout their lives. A woman in jail told me that when her boyfriend deserted her and her baby, she had no money even to purchase diapers. Out of desperation, she started selling drugs (eventually to an undercover police officer). She asserted that she is not a "criminal," but just wanted to care for her infant. One might wonder the following: What does her choice of boyfriend say about her? Why did she not seek help to receive financial assistance? What, if any, was her prior connection to drugs and how did she find her way into the drug market? As was the case with this woman, there is always more to the story about the person committing a crime versus resolving her dilemma in a more responsible way.

Samenow correctly notes that an individual's bad choices lead to crime, and that environmental factors might make committing crime easier or harder without being determinative.

Samenow considers many factors, but omits a big one: the ethics of altruism, which Peter Schwartz rightly argues leads to a Tyranny of Need.

It is much as I once observed when I likened altruism to a "mental kill-switch" after I saw a fiscal conservative politician stop in his tracks when asked if Americans have a "right to eat" (No one does, if it comes at the expense of another.): The fact that this woman chose to engage in an illegal activity (Set aside for the sake of argument whether it should be illegal.) after a series of other irresponsible actions is supposed to be ignored -- because she is needy herself and double because she did what she did allegedly for the sake of a baby.

Consider the fact that the many other excuses/inducements the "root cause" trope offers for criminals center on poverty and repression. Also consider the fact that very different (and often very constructive) responses to such circumstances are all around us. (Samenow cites one that was on the same page as a story about "root causes" of crime.)

To say that the new title of Peter Schwartz's expanded edition of In Defense of Selfishness is apt is a monumental understatement: "Need" causes an incredible degree of blindness -- blindness that I'd quickly condemn as willful were it not for the fact that so many people are trained from early childhood to turn their brains off and start sacrificing the moment they hear that someone lacks something that they have, no matter why, and no matter whether they deserve to continue having that thing.

Human beings have free will, and Samenow is correct that individuals making bad choices are the cause of crime. But among the contributing factors, or "opportunities" as Samenow calls them, it is altruism -- by excusing crime, or making it seem likely to a criminal that he will get away with it, or even giving it a moral sanction (See modern conceptions of Robinhood.) -- that is my nominee as the top contributing factor to crime.

-- CAV