I had a recent radio experience which annoyed me.
I was on to discuss the North Richmond safe injecting facility and its recent neighbourhood backlash.
Prior to be being interviewed, a Richmond business owner phoned in to talk about her harrowing experience with a man in the area. This man was abusive and urinated at the entrance to her business.
The business owner was understandably furious at this behaviour and shifted that emotion to the safe injecting facility.
Within the context of the interview I was asked to excuse this anti-social behaviour. Something that I didn’t feel was warranted.
North Richmond has had major issues with crime and disorderly conduct for decades. Between towering social housing blocks, a thriving heroin market and a high density of liquor outlets, the area is a hot spot of some of the most disordered characters you’ll ever meet.
A friend of mine who works in social housing described the environment in some parts of North Richmond as ‘straight out of The Wire’. There’s a lot more than problematic drug use going on.
The public pisser was no doubt one of these characters, but who knows if he had any connection with the facility?
Safe injecting facilities do a lot of good. They clean-up needle litter, reduce public injecting and stop people dying in parking lots. They work quite well in other jurisdictions and there is no evidence facilities create a ‘honey pot’ or increase in crime rates.
However, for some reason by defending this evidence-based intervention I was also being asked to defend shitty behaviour.
This got me thinking, how much does understanding the causes of crime impact moral blame?
Understanding Crime
There is no pithy, concise way to summarise decades of research on crime — other than to say its very complicated stuff!
Criminologists generally apply the scientific method to behaviour society labels as problematic. Through case studies, data collection and statistical analysis certain theories or models of anti-social behaviour are created and are used to generate policy interventions.
Generally, these methods work backwards: looking at the crime itself or the offender and finding risk factors along a causal chain which are primed for intervention.
Amongst the many cited causes or ‘determinants’ of criminal behaviour are poor parenting, poverty, mental illness, substance use, toxic gender norms, genetic propensity, low intelligence and social inequality.
However, none of these risk factors are the ultimate ‘cause’ of behaviour. For every offender from a troubled background who commits a crime, there are millions of people from the exact same life situation who don’t.
Crime is ultimately a choice.
Of course, this gets us into tedious philosophical discussions about ‘free will’. However, even if you believe that all our actions are ultimately predetermined causally (as I do), a drug dependent person’s decision to piss on a stoop is as ‘existentially free’ as my decision not to eat that last slice of pizza.
We all have agency by default.
So, does that mean that everyone who commits a crime is just an asshole? Well that’s where we get to the moral part of the story.
Moral Blame
I’m not a huge fan of ‘morality’ — at least as is commonly articulated.
The universe is horrendously, terrifyingly amoral. Whilst I don’t believe in some ontological concept of ‘evil’, I do know when someone is being an absolute prick.
Judging and blaming others for actions we don’t like is a distinct part of our animal psyche that we aren’t going to shake. And frankly, I’m all for it!
There is a nice social function to situations where I see a guy dangerously speeding through a suburban street and I flip him off.
This is particularly pleasant when there is a witness to this wrongdoing and we share a knowing glance of our condemnation of the speeding dickhead, strengthening social bonds and giving us a nice dopamine hit from solidarity.
So, to what extent does understanding risk factors of crime shift how we should judge the actions of others?
I’d be lying if I said it had no impact on how I approach things, but it certainly has less of an impact than many people seem to assume.
My education has made me somewhat more forgiving when it comes to actions made in desperation, particularly the result of poverty.
Call me a callous bastard but when a homeless person shoplifts food, I’m willing to call it wrong but I’m hardly outraged beyond belief.
However, I’d struggle to find a situation where I’d be willing to forgive violence or intimidation because of social circumstances. Nor am I going to defend the Richmond man who emptied his bladder on a public stoop.
My only other shift in perspective that my education has instilled on me, is there are no good reasons to criminalise something where someone is only ‘harming’ themselves. This strongly informs my belief in the decriminalisation of drugs.
Ultimately however, understanding the determinants of crime have made me more critical of anti-social behaviour.
Too often we see things like ‘stress’ or ‘alcohol’ used as an excuse for violent or otherwise shitty behaviour. Similarly, substance use and mental illness.
People who use drugs aren’t bad people. But some awful people also use drugs and I’m very reluctant to externalise blame to abstract concepts like ‘addiction’.
Nor is mental illness a get out of jail free card.
Mental health diagnoses are designed for therapeutic purposes and rarely have relevance to whether someone is morally blameworthy.
Despite courts frequently relying on psychiatric opinion to determine responsibility, I’m gradually being convinced that this is bogus.
To this extent I actually think my education and experience makes me more likely to view someone as responsible than the general public.
Being Realistic
So, if I’m happy to play the blame game, why do I support progressive ‘bleeding-heart’ policy proposals? Because they work!
What is often lost in discussions regarding criminal justice reform, is that proposals are backed by some pretty solid science.
Current criminal justice processes which rely on imprisonment just create more disturbed and dangerous individuals.
Unconstrained police powers and an overbearing coercive State result in brutal, dystopian outcomes.
The current ‘War on Drugs’ increases drug-related harms and creates organised crime.
You don’t have to reserve moral judgement to be realistic about solutions.
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The lesson I’ve learned from this experience is that policy advocates like myself need to be more explicit about our distinction between good policy and morality.
Understanding how the world works, doesn’t make someone passive in the face of bad behaviour.