Preventing crime

Discussions on crime prevention often place an emphasis on law enforcement and the punishment of offenders. Aside from failings in the police, many tend to attribute the causes of crime to poverty and the breakdown of the family and society.

It is indeed true that the threat of being arrested and subsequent punishment can serve as a deterrent to crime, though when potential offenders have too little to lose by their incarceration, the efficacy of the deterrent diminishes.

Poverty is an obvious source of crime, but poverty in itself does not cause crime, since most poor people are not criminals.

The incidence of crime therefore resides in myriad causes, not all of them predictable.

Statistics indicate that children from broken homes are at greater statistical risk of entering a life of truancy and crime than children from intact homes.

Clearly ways must be found to address the rate of delinquency among children from broken homes. The public pays a price when governments and society fail to support families, especially those where circumstances are difficult.

It is also true, however, that most children from single-parent homes are every bit as decent as those from more traditional families. We must beware of attaching an unjust stigma to such children, or to their parents.

Moreover, a significant class of criminals comes from backgrounds of social stability, and even privilege: thieves whose felonies are trivialised by the euphemism “white collar crime”.

The crisis in crime has its most obvious roots in morality and ethics.

Addressing an Interpol conference in Rome this month, the Vatican’s secretary for relations with states, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, linked such ethics – the sense of what is right – with crime prevention, saying that “a primary and preventative role belongs to education inspired by respect for human life in all circumstances”.

Archbishop Mamberti identified the family as the primary agent in imparting these values, much as the Church holds that the family is the first line of education in all things, including religious faith.

When a family can instil in a child a sense of justice and dignity – when it calibrates the child’s moral compass – then, according to the archbishop’s reasoning, that child will be less likely to transgress against others than a child that has been brought up with compromised values.

In a functional family, “children experience the value of their own transcendent dignity, as they are accepted gratuitously on the basis of the stable and reciprocal love of their parents”, Archbishop Mamberti said.

The challenge for society is to identify where such a formation and love is deficient or absent, and what can be done about it.

This, of course, requires a deployment in resources, especially in the field of social work and services, which governments may be loath to make. Civil society, including the churches, already runs commendable programmes to help fill that gap, but resources are insufficient to meet a massive need such as that which South Africa faces.

But even a “good home” can give its children poor guidance when parents fail to lead by example. In South Africa especially, there is a culture of impunity which tolerates transgressions against legal or moral codes.

This culture of impunity has infected all of us who commit infractions – drink-driving, littering, petty theft, coercive conduct, insurance fraud and so on – simply because we can get away with it.

People who buy stolen goods or fraternise with criminals (never mind protecting them from detection) convey an acquiescence in criminality that erodes ethical codes.

Some years ago, Archbishop Buti Tlhagale of Johannesburg went as far as saying that such people’s “hands are dripping with the blood of innocent people”.

The slippery slope of the culture of impunity starts with the motorist who throws a cigarette butt out of the window, and it ends with the anarchy of crime.

Whenever we engage in illegal or unethical behaviour, even if our offences are relatively petty, we locate ourselves somewhere on that slippery slope, and we corrupt, by our example, those whose characters we are called to shape.