Setting criminals free: Think of the community

Vincent J. Curtis

10 May 22

RE: Justice failing indigenous peoples.  Spectator editorial 10 May 22.

It wouldn’t be a Spectator editorial if there wasn’t at least one long-discredited progressive axiom regurgitated in it.  Today, we get two!

The first is that “poverty causes crime” and the other is that “19^th century colonialism is responsible for aboriginal law-breaking in the 21^st century.”  I don’t know how many times the canard “poverty causes crime” has been discredited and disproven, but my records show going back to the 1930s.  Similar claims were made about comic books and certain kinds of movies.  The disproofs are everywhere. For example, that if poverty causes crime, why are so few of the poor actual lawbreakers?  Why aren’t they all the poor lawbreakers?

The same reasoning applies to the colonization canard.  Why are so few aboriginals criminal law-breakers if colonization caused aboriginals to commit crime?  Why aren’t they all, or nearly all?

There are many who look to sub-cultures for causes of crime, and others who look to the character of the individual for answers.  But we do not know the causes of crime, save one: the law, for without a law to break there can be no lawbreaking.

What must not be done is to let out the lawbreakers out of some misplaced sympathy for their racial identity.  White people don’t want sex offenders released into their neighbourhoods, and aboriginal communities don’t want unreformed criminals let loose back into theirs.

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