Crime & The Big Con

Tom Geoghegan, otherwise known as One of the Best Writers in America, has a fascinating piece [1] over at the American Prospect which I just got around to reading. He looks at how the criminal justice issue - and more narrowly, America's unfathomably high rate of incarceration - is rarely discussed in our political debate. I found this paragraph most interesting, in how it ties the issue back to Big Con:

"People are delighted when Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan goes to jail. When there was a chance that Karl Rove might be indicted, my friends were planning parties -- literally. Why celebrate Karl Rove or anyone else going to prison? It's hard to think of any greater tragedy in life than to be locked up in a prison. Certainly we have monsters that we have to get off the streets. But as a liberal, I take no pleasure when the rich and Republican go to jail. For one thing it's just another sad proof that the New Deal regulatory state has collapsed. We have to use criminal law to stop what our now deregulated civil administrative law used to stop." (emphasis added)

This is an incredibly important point. The criminal justice system is supposed to be the last, final, bedrock barrier between civilization and total chaos. Society is supposed to have all sorts of institutions to make sure people don't end up in the criminal justice system - and more specifically, in jail. When someone goes to jail, it means that beyond bad behavior of the individual actor, all those institutions of civil society broke down.

This is true, as Geoghegan says, especially as it relates to white-collar and political crime. Sure, when you see Enron executives or Jack Abramoff going to jail, it should be a relief at one level. At least, in the end, they finally caught those bad guys. But at another level, it should be very troubling because it means all sorts of institutions - from the SEC to the FEC - failed to set up regulatory or transparency systems that would have prevented or limited their crimes in the first place, thus preventing or limiting all sorts of societal damage they inflicted.

No, I'm not going to pull a Rush Limbaugh From the Left and say that all crime is the result of the Right's deregulatory ideology - just like it was absurd during the 1980s for conservatives to assert that the Left's more liberal criminal justice ideology was the cause of urban crime waves. Crime is a mix of all sorts of factors - some socioeconomic, some cultural, and some just straight craziness and evil. But within that mix of factors is the collapse of civil society aided and abetted by the Big Con.

By the way, if you want to delve further into the argument Geoghegan is making, go pick up his newest book called See You In Court [2].