The Origin of Crime Is the Decision to Commit It.
23rd February 2022
As I got to know these people, I had many conversations during which I tried to advise them on how to avoid these difficult circumstances in the future. I was often surprised to discover that they already knew full well what it would take to avoid these circumstances in the future. But they had no intention at all of modifying their behavior for the simple reason that they preferred the inconvenience of arrest to the discipline of managing their own affairs.
And it wasn’t even a matter of the money. The modest payment plan for their traffic citations, which would have been acceptable to the city, could have often been funded for less than they spent in one week on cigarettes. To say nothing of the money they spent on weed.
It also wasn’t the case that they robotically went about their lives without an explicit point of view about their choices. They almost always had a very well-developed worldview that informed their choices and, more to the point, they were conscious of what it was and could readily articulate it.
Many people are criminals because they prefer to be criminals. They have a choice and they make it. Society is not to blame; their circumstances are not to blame; nothing extrinsic is to blame — they are.