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Carlos Hudson

Crime and Economics

Starving Men Steal

(May 1934)

From The Militant, Vol. VII No. 20, 19 May 1934, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

In Buffalo, New York, a young unemployed worker is shot dead for taking a loaf of bread. In Chicago, three Negro workers are killed for participating in a protest demonstration against eviction. In New York City scores of men have been beaten and jailed for demanding adequate relief. All over America in 1933 – in Los Angeles, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia – tens of thousands of unemployed workers have been given jail sentences for stealing food, clothing, money.

As the depression deepens it is evident that the crime wave grows in intensity. Even a cursory examination of the latest criminal statistics will disclose the fact that the vast majority of crimes are petty crimes against property. The reason for this is not hard to find; the fountain head for the overwhelming majority of all crime is poverty and want. It is not the well-to-do, the big bourgeoisie, who suffer from want of food and clothing; it is the workers and the lower stratum of the petty bourgeoisie – the declassed, the dispossessed.

Petty crime, then, has a class basis. It arises from the worker’s fight for life. It is on a different class basis than is gangsterism, for instance, which arises from bourgeois greed (in Chicago, for just one example, where has been traced the connecting links binding together the gangsters, Capone, Madden, O’Donnell, Durkin, etc.; the Pinkerton and Burns Detective Agency; the A.F. of L. trades unions, Tim Murphy and other leaders; the International Harvester Company, the Chicago Tribune and other manufacturers and newspapers; the judges, chiefs of police, aldermen, bankers such as Melvin Traylor, Insull; city corporation counsels such as Ettleson, state’s attorneys, etc.)
 

Prison Statistics

A surveyal of penal justice in the United States, and the penal code as it is functioning today, enables one to draw some interesting conclusions. Let us look at the following statistics, which indicate how crime increases in direct proportion as the proletariat becomes increasingly impoverished. Here is the prison census for seven years, the figures being taken from the U.S. Bureau of the Census covering State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories:

Isn’t it obvious that our American school of criminology, with its cruel sentences, its fantastic jails and jailors, its unrealistic outlook, has not been able to lessen crime. On the contrary, America has arrived at a morass of vice which increases yearly with frightening speed. The stark truth is, of course, that nothing can ever be done to combat crime so long as capitalism reigns; for as capitalism cannot guarantee that no one will starve, it can not reach the basis of crime. The swampy soil of crime is the economic poverty of the masses which leads to their intellectual and moral poverty. Abolish want and starvation and you strike directly at the roots of 90% of the crimes that are committed daily. Abolish poverty by socializing wealth so that none of us need go hungry or unclothed – then will you see crime disappear as does fog under the noonday sun.

In 1932 and 1933 the following Part 1 offences were known to the police of this country:

In 1932 there were, then, 741,120 known Part 1 crimes, of which 722,069, or 98.8% were crimes against property.

In 1933, despite vast increases in federal and state relief, there were 780,193 crimes, of which 771,472, or 98.9%, were crimes against property (robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft).
 

The Economic Factor in Crime

Figures for previous years are not even available, or have been suppressed, such is the quixotic manner in which our government treats its criminal problem. But enough is indicated for us to see that the overwhelming majority of crimes are crimes against property. And crimes against property are, for the greater part, committed because the offenders are poor and, not being able to find employment are forced to seek elsewhere for the means to feed and clothe themselves, to keep a roof over their heads.

Yes, the economic factor is the all-important one in these crimes And do you doubt that this same factor counts powerfully in the cases of non-negligent and negligent manslaughter, in rape; and in the execution of minor offences, such as boot-legging, dope-peddling, etc.?

THE CAUSE OF CRIME IS POVERTY! Let us turn for a moment to foreign shores. Here is a report by Mr. Negley Farson on crime in Great Britain:

“Increase in crime coincides exactly with the industrial depression in Great Britain. Per million population, we find that burglaries were 3,000 in 1913, 3,500 in 1928, 8,000 in 1931 – the rise of 4,500 or 150% during the last two years proves out Sir Herbert Samuel’s (the British Home Minister) contention that crime increases in exact ratio with the industrial depression. The industrial depression has not increased crimes of passion, although robbery with violence is daily more prevalent. Roughly, the crime sheet for Great Britain for 1930 works out as follows:

In 1930 in Great Britain, then, 116,400 crimes were committed, ol which 95.6% were crimes against property. Great Britain’s total indictable offences increased roughly by 12,000, or just under 10%. Facing such an increase, British courts have been imposing longer as well as more sentences to penal servitude.”

One more set of criminal statistics, those taken over several years in New York City:

More Criminals – Bigger Jails

In New York City crimes against property have definitely increased during the depression. The living standard of the worker has been pushed lower and lower. And yet all New York City can or will do is to increase its police force, pour more millions into its rotten gangster-infested police department, instruct its courts and judges to hand out more and sterner sentences, build bigger jails.

All Great Britain can think of to combat crime is to “impose longer and more plentiful sentences to penal servitude.”

To move to strike at the causes of crime, to relieve the destitution of the masses which leads to the commission of crime – ah, no. Treason! God forbid! Why this might lead to an acknowledgment that all was not well with the system; this would be a betrayal of all those petty theories worked out by our “scientific” sociologists and criminologists.

(Second Article Next Week)

 
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