Criminality and economic conditionsBonger, Willem Adriaan
General
Criminality and economic conditions
Bonger, Willem Adriaan
Crime -- Economic aspects
Our opinions can always harmonize with those of the people around us,
while we are foreign to them in desire and feeling. “The criminal is he
who, undergoing conformity to the ideas of the community in which he
lives, yet escapes from conforming to the feelings and acts of the
community. He acts contrary to his own principles, which are those of
society.” “It is, then, not to a social crisis that we must mount, but
to a psychological crisis that we must descend, to explain crime.”
[153]
Social crises are of two kinds: politico-religious, and economic. In
opposition to divers statisticians, who are of the opinion that the
former class cause a diminution in criminality, the author thinks that
this diminution is only apparent, and that in reality the number of
crimes increases at these times; which is shown, for example, for
France by the addition of cases not prosecuted to those prosecuted.
As to the effect of economic crises, statisticians, Professor Tarde
claims, have not yet examined it. It seems to him that there is no
parallelism between economic crises and criminality.
The struggle of classes, which springs up and grows during the periods
of crisis, is a great danger to public morals, since it gives rise to a
class spirit, and consequently increases the contempt for the rights of
individuals of another class. However, the class struggle does not
increase the number of individual crimes, but only the number of
collective crimes.
To sum up, Professor Tarde is of the opinion, then, that social crises
in general, and economic crises in particular, are not the only source
nor a continual source of crime. The question of what is the cause of
economic crises remains unexplained. To solve this we must call in all
political economy. The causes of these economic crises are in brief:
first, unlimited competition; second, unforeseen disasters. “We may add
that these acute conflicts lead to suicide more than to crime; they are
a factor of crime much less important than the sullen conflicts, the
low but continuous fevers of troubled epochs in quest of a stable
state. And these are then less the conflicts of production with itself,
or of production with consumption, than the conflicts of consumption
with itself, i.e. the conflicts of needs that have grown but cannot be
satisfied at the time, within the limits of the always insufficient
wages or profits, a fertile source of criminal suggestions. When labor
no longer suffices to satisfy the legitimate needs in accordance with
the prevailing standards, the desire of gain without labor invades the
heart and becomes general. The only remedy for this danger would be the
advancement of manufacturing and its reorganization upon a vaster and
better conceived plan than the present one, if, at the same time that
any industrial progress gave more wealth for less labor, it did not
give rise to still more new wants. The individual organization of
wants, their hierarchization, by virtue of a certain unanimity of
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