Youth crime is once more in the news, with riots in Alice Springs leading to calls for curfews and troops, and the LNP’s Queensland electioneering policy calling for more police and stiffer penalties.
Yet we know from decades’ experience that policing is no answer in itself. Not even if special squads of gang police were authorized to shoot suspects. That’s because root causes remain unaddressed. Most likely even unrecognized.
All major parties, and the people who vote for them, have assumed for decades that the increasing monetization of every aspect of social life is accepted as casually by everyone as it is by the bourgeoisie—those who have bought into and structured their lives around neoliberal political economy, with its built-in and ever increasing concentration of wealth and inequality.
Those who have no money have been progressively and deliberately excluded from the most basic of social activities and rituals. They cannot buy the clothes they would like to wear. They cannot go see, buy, or even play the kind of music they want to. They cannot go to sports matches, and in many cases, not even play sports themselves. They can’t go out to cinemas, bars, clubs, or restaurants. They can’t afford laptops, or scooters, or cars, or other status symbols.
But they are continually bombarded with advertising messages reminding them just what pathetic failures they are for not being able to participate in an entirely consumption-driven society. And when they look at their parents, and grandparents, they know it’s a generational exclusion with no hope in sight.
So, they adopt a nihilism that is expressed in disrespect for the lives and property of others, lashing out and destroying what they have been denied, and knowing that even if they are caught and punished, that punishment is likely no worse than their everyday lives are already.
Worst of all, they can see by the example of politicians and business executives that crime at that level is never punished. That it is only the poor and disenfranchised who are criminalized for breaking laws.
No policy devised by people blind to their own bourgeois subjectivity will ever address youth crime. If you cannot see past your own biases, problems which are caused by them in the first place will appear impossible to resolve, and a cycle of persisting with policies that have already, demonstrably, failed will begin or continue. Bourgeois assumptions have to be recognized for what they are: class prejudices. Such a recognition might lead to the revelation that reversing the most demeaning effects of neoliberal political economy could work much better than policing in stemming crime of any kind. A process of de-monetizing socialization at an early age, even if that means subsidy for all children to participate in their societies. Allowing especially the most underprivileged to develop a sense of belonging, of being part owners of their societies, but without placing impossible financial pressures on their parents or stigmatizing the kids for being subsidized.
How to fund this? My inclination is that banks, the big consulting firms, wage thieves, and other white collar criminals should be levied in lieu of neither board members nor executives ever being charged with the crimes they have committed, let alone sent to gaol. And levied in a way that makes it impossible to pass on the costs to consumers rather than taking the hit in profits and executive bonuses. Start with banks; we already know they are run as criminal cartels through the evidence gathered by the royal commission of 2017-2019. We learnt recently just how corrupt the big consulting firms are. And wage thieves are exposed so regularly these days that it seems reasonable to suspect it’s an endemic practice, especially in franchise and other big business operations.
But none of that will ever happen. It is the nature of the bourgeoisie to believe quite blindly, almost religiously, that its own subjectivity is in fact objective reality. Almost everyone in that class is clueless about how people excluded from it live their daily lives. Every now and then we get direct evidence of this class divide when a politician can’t answer questions about the price of a loaf of bread, a litre of milk, or the cost of petrol. I would guess most senior executives would be similarly divorced from the political economy of poverty.
So, more police it is. Stiffer penalties it is. More and bigger gaols it is. More and better trained gangsters leaving those gaols (occasionally) it is.
Perhaps people who vote for tough-on crime policies, and the politicians who deliver it, get exactly what they asked for. More and more youth crime. That message sells well, doesn’t it, in our monetized society.
That's what I was looking for
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