The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'painting of a pickpocket.'
For decades, crime trended downward in the US. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics data reported by PEW Research "the overall violent crime rate fell 74% between 1993 and 2019, while the property crime rate fell 71%." 2020 shifted this trend. Another Pew page informs us that, "The U.S. murder rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020 – the largest single-year increase in more than a century." Squeezed by pandemic policies, more people started killing each other and likely committing other crimes as well. Even so, violent crime is still broadly down from its peak levels 30 years ago.
I don't attribute this positive trend to our criminal justice system. That system is clearly broken. Rather, I think that society has generally become less and less accepting of violence in recent decades. The violence underpinning our way of life has largely been externalized to other countries and violence within our borders has been increasingly confined to marginalized communities that are effectively segregated from more affluent neighborhoods.
In other words, we've been displacing violence instead of addressing its root causes. Poverty. Food deserts. Unfair systems. Barriers to accessing medical care. Until these things are fixed, they'll continue contributing to antisocial behavior. Playing by society's rules makes little sense when society is continually harming you.
Desperate people do desperate things. But even if we transformed our whole system to prevent such desperation from ever materializing, there would still be plenty of people doing wrong by each other. At one extreme there's rampant sexual predation. For reference, about 2 percent of Catholic clergy are pedophiles. More common are people who live by shamelessly taking from others, materially and otherwise.
It's not clear that either group would be deterred if society was made more fair. Although predators and parasites represent just a tiny percentage of our population, their impact would remain significant and negative. Even in a best case scenario, it wouldn't be easy to identify people like this and prevent them from harming others.
Complicating matters is a control regime that's both predatory and parasitic. Some of the regime's crimes are direct and obvious. Others are indirect and may go undetected. There's no malice in the control regime's misbehavior. There is only impersonal articulation of profitable agendas.
The control regime isn't a person with a personality. It's a segmented, polycentric integrated network. Still, picturing the control regime as a person can be useful in making sense of our situation. I see it as an abusive alcoholic father who is tyrannical at home and barely functional at work. The kind of guy who buys sex with his kid's college money and convinces his neighbors to fight each other.
The metaphor breaks down quickly. A guy like that can change if he wants to. He can start making better choices and find others that support those choices. The control regime, on the other hand, cannot simply change. It's not so much a person as a software running in powerful social networks. Substituting one individual for another does nothing to alter the software. I'm not sure how such software could be altered.
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