Mantras and Reality

One of the mantras that has defined much of the speculation about crime and criminals over the past several decades is that crime is a result of social structural inequities and criminals are victims of society and/or rapacious government—depending on who is currently in power.

If any aspect of this was true to any significant degree, then a struggling economy would surely suggest a rise in criminality as socially directed criminals respond to less opportunity to be productive citizens by increasing their criminality, but as this article notes, that is not occurring yet.

From a traditional Catholic perspective, the social cause of crime is not true—to any significant degree—and criminals remain individuals who act on their own, know what they are doing, and have made their decisions and acted upon them in a relatively well thought out and utilitarian process based on the values of the world they perceive.

This social causation of crime perspective lies at the heart of the decades old failure of rehabilitation programs to actually rehabilitate, as they fail to rely on the truism that criminals are self directed individuals and as such, will only respond to rehabilitative strategies that present them with true reasons for leaving the criminal world for the communal—which the Lampstand model is built upon and addressed in the series of books we have published.