Criminals Are Made, Not Born

First the good news: Experts are finally facing up to the real cause of crime.

It’s about time. Since the thirties, we have lived with the myth that crime is not the responsibility of the individual, but rather, it is a societal ailment: “Good” people go bad because they live in ghettos, are deprived, or discriminated against.

Thus, criminals were seen as victims; society was to blame. Ramsey Clark, U.S. attorney general in the midsixties, summed up the prevailing view: “Poverty is the cause of crime.” So the response was to clean up societal ills that caused crime and to “treat” the criminal like any other sick person.

This gave birth to a criminal-justice system seeking to rehabilitate offenders rather than punish them. To accommodate those who needed to be “healed” of criminal behavior, we built more and more prisons—and over the years, jammed them full.

Rehabilitation sounded like such a good idea. The only problem was that it didn’t work. Institutions cannot deal with the real cause of crime, which is the sinful heart of man. Thus, the real legacy of the therapeutic approach was the creation of the third-largest prison population per capita in the world.

In his prophetic essay written in the 1930s, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” C. S. Lewis pointed out the flaw in rehabilitation philosophy. The purpose of prison, Lewis argued, is not therapy, but punishment: “To be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.”

Lewis’s argument is at the heart of Judeo-Christian belief. Individuals are responsible for their own actions; they must be held to account and punished for their wrong moral choices. Prisons are thus not for therapy; they exist to confine and punish dangerous criminals.

At long last, secular scholars are arriving at this same conclusion. In their 17-year study, The Criminal Personality, psychologists Stanton E. Same-now and Samuel Yochelson concluded that crime is a moral problem. The answer, they say, is “conversion” of the individual to a more responsible lifestyle.

And earlier this year, Crime and Human Nature, the widely acclaimed work of Harvard professors James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, argued that though intellect and genetic characteristics may influence behavior, crime is a function of individual choice. These choices are determined by one’s moral conscience, which is shaped early in life, most crucially by the family.

This awakening is good news. But it may not last long: at the same time that we are rediscovering crime is a moral problem, we are also finding that the very institutions that shape moral values are crumbling.

In his documentary on the vanishing family in the inner city, CBS correspondent Bill Moyers provides chilling evidence of this. Moyers says that more than half of today’s inner-city babies are born to unmarried teenage mothers.

“Don’t you feel responsible for your children?” he asked one young man who has fathered six youngsters by four women. “No,” the young man shrugged, “not going to have a woman spoil my life.” Welfare pays the bill, so why should he worry? Alice, a young woman who has borne two of his children, said welfare made her lazy; but she couldn’t survive without $385 a month in government checks and another $112 in food stamps.

Ironically, the same social engineering policies of 40 years ago that gave us overcrowded, ineffective prisons have also cultivated a patronizing welfare system that has destroyed the inner-city black family.

But this is not just a black problem. Since 1940, there has been an 800 percent increase in teenage pregnancies among whites; meanwhile, welfare has created a disincentive to marriage, effectively subsidizing children born out of wedlock. These children are being deprived of family guidance in their moral development—at the very time Wilson and Herrnstein cite it as most critical.

Well, if moral training is not happening in the home, then what about the schools? The picture there is equally bleak. The New York Times recently reported on a New Jersey high school class in which students were asked about the conduct of the girl who found $1,000 and turned it in. All 15 agreed she was a fool.

The students’ guidance counselor gave no opinion: “If I come from the position of what is right and what is wrong, then I’m not their counselor.”

This is the result of the values-clarification movement’s studious scrubbing of moral values from our schools. As Glen Loury, professor of political economics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, pointed out in the Moyers documentary: “Try to teach in a sex-education class in New York City that having a kid out of wedlock is wrong, and the value-clarifications people come at you out of the woodwork telling you, ‘Well, no, what we should do is let kids find out for themselves.’ ”

Though the decline of the baby-boom era should mean a decline in crime, as I’ve believed until now, no one who watched the Moyers documentary could believe that. No, we have stripped ourselves of the moral weapons to fight crime—and we may not be able to build prisons fast enough to house the lost generation of kids roaming the moral deserts of our nation’s cities.

An obvious place to begin—if we have the political courage—is to reform the welfare system, meeting genuine need, but eliminating its subsidies for mothers to remain unwed and its disincentives for work, responsibility, and the family.

Second, Christians need to storm local school boards and PTA meetings before values-clarification zealots lobotomize the moral function in the minds of an entire generation.

But it is not enough just to criticize existing programs. Unless we start dealing with the difficult business of bringing hope to the inner city, there will be no hope. It’s a huge problem—but it can be tackled, a block at a time.

I have seen John Perkins open his home to kids from urban Pasadena, bringing slow but steady changes to their lives. I have seen God work powerfully on city streets across the nation, one person at a time. And that is Good News that will last.

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