Assuming that you're not, think about why you're not a criminal.
Or maybe that's too easy. You're not a criminal because you're a good person with a functioning moral compass. I don't doubt that. So (assuming that he isn't) think about why your neighbor isn't a criminal.
Maybe it's because he's like you, just an inherently good person. But it could be because he's been deterred from pursuing a life of crime because he understands that the risks aren't worth the potential gain. Because he's a rational actor who understands that pursuing a life of crime would expose him to certain legal penalties and cause his friends to think poorly of him.
If your neighbor were to game it out, he might conclude that holding up liquor stores is not such a good job. The logistics are difficult. There's equipment--disposable getaway vehicles, handguns, canvas sacks with big dollar signs printed on the side--to be acquired. He might have to employ confederates, and they might prove unreliable. He would have to accept that his potential revenue isn't guaranteed and that others involved in the transaction might not be cooperative.
(It may be important to limit this discussion to street crime, for there is another sort of crime which draws neither the opprobrium of the public nor the closed fist of the law. If you are a big enough thief, you might find yourself part of what is, in America, a well-nigh worshipped class.)
Eventually, our prospective criminal will probably, if he is rational, likely conclude that, outside the occasional opportunistic event, crime simply does not pay.
Yet we have crime in this country, and some people think we have an awful lot of it. And we do, in pockets. Pockets where some of us rarely venture.
No one should think there isn't pure meanness in the world. There is, and anyone who's spent significant time online has likely encountered it. There are also sociopaths and people who would take pleasure in doing your family harm. The evil men do each other is not always explicable.
But if you want to start to really make a difference, you have to start to look hard at those pockets that breed crime and ask yourself why so many of the people we've consigned to those pockets have decided crime is a rational, viable thing to do. You have to ask yourself why they feel they have no better option than to emulate what most of us might consider the bad guys in The Wire.
Sure, there's something in our culture. We can talk (actually we can't) about the quasi-religious ferocity with which we love our firearms in America or about the thousands of murders most of us witness electronically before we're packed off to school. We ought to interrogate the gunfighter myth that warps our understanding of this country's history. But that's for the pointy-headed and the effete; there are more immediate practical concerns.
Like forming another task force and imprisoning even more of our population. Because that stuff always works.
Look, we can't pass any more gun legislation, but maybe we ought to enforce the federal laws that are already on the books. And while we're at it, maybe we can do something to make our militarized police forces seem less like occupying armies and more like sentinels in some of our neighborhoods.
Maybe we could pay a little more in taxes to pay our police better, to give the job a little more status. Maybe we could train our cops better. Maybe we could inject a little empathy training into the curriculum. Maybe all of us could stand to be a little bit more humble.
Because people are basically people. They act as they act because they're faced with a specific set of facts and assumptions. More than any of us want to admit, we are products of our environment. We model ourselves on the examples that are available. Given the conditions we've created--and it is all of us, what we used to call "society," that created these conditions--maybe we ought to regard every needy young person who works behind a counter for minimum wage a hero. At the very least we ought to accord them a measure of dignity.
Because I'm not sure they wouldn't be better off if they were to make the sort of choices that most newspaper readers would dismiss as irrational. I'm not sure they wouldn't be better served assuming some of the risks we associate with a life of crime.
So why don't they? It's like you said, because they're good people. Because they have the character to do what's morally right even when the game is so stacked against them that, failing enormous luck or some indomitable talent, they are destined to continue to lead thwarted lives, cut off figuratively and sometimes literally from the sort of lives most newspaper readers take for granted.
------------v------------
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 07/11/2017