“Dragging Us Into a Law and Order Society” Part 2.

In the previous blog on this subject, I floated the idea that the UK Government intends to find new ways in which to tax us in order to make up the shortfall in the UK Treasury which will inevitably arise as a result of her new ‘spend us out of trouble’ policies. I had begun to examine the rush to greater criminalization as a means of providing the justification for confiscating our assets, as an alternative to punitive taxation.

The Americans have willingly adopted ‘follow the money’ confiscatory crime control policies for some years, and there is absolutely no evidence to show that it has had any meaningful impact upon the prevention, or detection of crime, nor has it provided any form of disincentive to criminals to continue committing crimes.

When discussing policies such as criminal confiscation, Naylor states;

‘…Some might argue that all this is a necessary response to an overarching social evil…Others might suggest that the entire exercise is simply insane. Despite lurid tales of great criminal hoards in the hands of great criminal hoards, no-one really knows how much criminal income and wealth exists, how illegal gains are distributed or how deleterious their impact on legitimate society is…’

Ironically, this is the very admission made in the Treasury document, but as Naylor points out later, is intended to have only one important influence, on the mind of the politicians.

‘…All that those frightening statistics really prove is that it is not necessary to take the square root of a negative sum to arrive at a purely imaginary number…the objective was not to illuminate the shadowy world of crime so much as to enlighten politicians about the need for larger law enforcement budgets and more arbitrary police powers. Therefore those magic numbers assume the status of religious cant and are rarely revised, except heavenward…’

The religious image is a useful one when considering the present state of British politics and its approach to crime in society. Trotting out the idea that criminals commit crimes for purely economically rational reasons, helps to persuade committed politicians of deeply held religious beliefs that their interdictory tactics are not merely good policy, but are underpinned by a strong moral justification for taking such action on the basis that crime must not be allowed to be seen to pay!
Naylor again on the issue of changing attitudes towards crime;

‘…In the new era of free-marketeering, the cant changed to favour punishment of individual wrongdoers. If, according to the old view, economically motivated crime was largely the consequence of unequal social and economic opportunity, then the government would be expected to redress the imbalance. But if, according to the new view, it was merely the work of bad people, there was no need to address the existing distribution of wealth and power. Thus the criminal came to be viewed not as a complex product of psycho-socio-economic conditions but as a simple cost-benefit calculator. It followed that crime could be addressed by merely tilting the likely outcome of such a calculation to reduce the potential profitability of the criminal’s actions, and to incapacitate (by stripping away economic assets as well as by imprisonment) those who failed to heed the initial warning…’

Returning to the UK Treasury Strategy document, yet another piece of spurious moral doggerel, unsupported by any empirical evidence whatsoever makes its appearance.

‘…Squeezing the profits from crime should reduce criminality directly in two ways. First, there will be less money available to finance future criminal activity. Second, lower criminal proceeds will reduce the incentive of crime as a lifestyle. A criminal lifestyle involves the risk of being caught and punished and the rewards have to be sufficient to make it worthwhile taking such risks. If the proceeds are reduced then some potential criminals may be dissuaded from the activity as a lifestyle. Showing that crime does not pay and criminals are not allowed to enjoy their ill-gotten gains will stop them from becoming “role models” in their communities and take away the false glamour that attaches to a criminal lifestyle in some communities.

Again, the authors of the Treasury Strategy document have been allowed to trot out more unjustifiable nonsense masquerading as empirical fact. One problem is that those who were responsible for its genesis, (the authors of the earlier report issued by the Policy Innovation Unit) failed to address and make the very important distinction between predatory crimes and market-based crimes. They instead refer to ‘acquisitive’ crimes, thus re-engineering the concept behind the definition of the underlying criminality, and giving it a far more obvious ‘cost-benefit calculation’ profile, thus bringing it firmly within the moral ambit of the ‘crime is a disease and I am the cure’ mantra of contemporary, New Labour thinking.

When talking about the periodical moral panics which grip all societies from time to time, Naylor examines the psychological mentality of the USA during the era of Prohibition, (from which era the follow-the-money and anti-money laundering mind-set flows), and sees significant parallels with modern society, on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘…There was a dramatic change in the direction of law enforcement. For the first time, the main thrust of the police action shifted from combating predatory offences (robbery, extortion, theft, practiced at the expense of an unwilling public) to attacking market-based crimes (in which underground entrepreneurs attempted to service the forbidden consumption need of a complicit public). Although both types of crime are lumped together in the criminal code, the economic nature of each is profoundly different and therefore so is the appropriate attitude of the authorities towards the profits derived from each…’

It is in the fundamental re-wording of the definition of crime as ‘acquisitive’ in the report, that the document sows so many seeds of potential problems for the future, but making up new words and phrases or redefining premises and inserting them into policy documents does not seem to pose any difficulties for New Labour apparatchiks, as we have seen amply demonstrated so recently elsewhere.
Naylor again;

‘…Predatory offences involve the redistribution of existing wealth. The transfers are bilateral, involving victim and perpetrator. These transfers are also involuntary commonly using force or the threat of force…because the transfer is involuntary, the morality is unambiguous – therefore, over and above direct punishment of the guilty party, the justice system’s response is restitution to the victim of his or her property…’

A perfectly sound policy of unimpeachable credentials. We have had restitutionary legislation in England and Wales since the 1970s. The problem became more manifest when the Courts demonstrated a diminishing willingness to use it effectively.

‘…By contrast, market-based crimes involve the production and distribution of new goods and services that happen to be illegal by their very nature. The exchanges are multilateral, much like legitimate market transactions, involving producers on the supply side and final consumers on the demand side. Because the transfers are voluntary, it is difficult to define a victim, unless it is some abstract concept such as ‘society’. Therefore there are no definable losses to any individual from the act itself…’

If we begin to look at the wider criminal problem in these terms, we can begin to see the underlying fallacy of the Treasury argument. Taking the proceeds of crime away from predatory criminals is little more than an illusion, because they never have enough money available to confiscate in the first place. Fundamentally, they commit their crimes to finance their otherwise dysfunctional lifestyle, and they use those proceeds, such as are generated, to purchase drugs, alcohol, and possibly food. The minimalist profits are spent almost as soon as they are realised, and very little is left to make its way into the hands of financial institutions. The last thing on the burglar’s mind as he runs off with a stolen stereo is which bank he should approach in which to deposit the proceeds of his crimes!

On the other hand, market-based crimes, deliver a huge volume of goods and services to a willing market. These criminals are merely ‘alternative’ commodity suppliers, and they operate on a ‘willing seller, willing buyer’ basis. They are the supply side of the criminal equation, and it is naive in the extreme to assume that they can be effectively dealt with and successfully interdicted by ‘follow the money’ crime control methods, in the broader spectrum, ie, the arena in which Government expects to see results.

The only people who still willingly espouse these methods are the law-enforcement lobby, whose appetite for spending more and more tax-payers’ money knows no limits. Nevertheless, despite a significant volume of evidence to the contrary, researched by practitioners of unimpeachable academic reputations, governments and their servants continue to ignore empirical evidence, preferring instead to promulgate polices of manifest nonsense like these being produced in the Treasury Strategy document.