Of course, this analysis does not seek crudely to ‘prove’ the ‘causes’ of crime. Rather, its purpose is to allow tendencies to delinquency to be predicted and — far more difficult — acted upon at an early age. But it is clearly also entirely compatible with the view that both dependency (which I suggest is more relevant than ‘poverty’) and family upbringing are crucial to any understanding of what has happened in the last thirty years to the crime rate.
The evidence of research from the United States is still clearer. A US Department of Health and Human Services study of 1988, which surveyed the families of more than 60,000 children all over the country, found that children who were living with a never-married or divorced mother were, at anything other than the highest income level, substantially more disposed to troublesomeness at school, and emotional and behavioural problems. The latest quinquennial survey of prison inmates by the Federal Bureau of Justice showed that two thirds of chronic violent offenders and a half of all inmates had come from a background other than a two-parent family; and 37 per cent of all inmates came from a foster home or child-care institution. More than half of the chronic violent criminals reported that an immediate family member had served some time in prison. Keith Joseph’s ‘cycle of deprivation’ thus becomes a ‘cycle of criminality’. The evidence about violent chronic offenders is particularly significant, because no group is perceived by the public as more of a threat.
In a free society there are limits to what government should seek to do to change people’s behaviour, particularly the behaviour of families. It is in considerable part because the state has intervened, on the basis of necessarily inadequate information and without proper consideration for the long-term consequences, that we are faced with so many intractable problems. But it is not only compatible with but essential to a free society to create a cultural, financial and legal framework which upholds, not undermines, the attitudes and institutions on which freedom rests.
What then is to be done? Aiming at improvement rather than Utopia, and without wishing to deny that there are other initiatives which the fertile minds of social scientists and policy-makers might usefully devise, I propose the following four-fold approach.
VIRTUES TO COMBAT VICES
The first, most important and most difficult area is the moral and cultural ethos. A functioning free society cannot be value-free. Down through the ages the most profound thinkers have recognized this. For me, Edmund Burke sums it up with a clarity and sweep no one else has managed:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and the good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.[96]
Similarly, although those who framed the American Constitution chose to rely on ambition countering ambition, rather than the virtues, to preserve liberty, the fathers of the early Republic were well aware that virtue could make a significant difference. As the great patriotic American hymn puts it:
The character of the citizen both reflects and is reflected by the character of the state. This is an encouraging fact, for it reassures us — as it reassured me in the late 1970s — that if a people is better than its government a change of administration can release undetected talents and open up undreamt-of possibilities. But it is also a warning. For even a well established system of free government is vulnerable to any profound changes in the outlook and mentality of the populace in general and the political class in particular. Character, both individual and collective, is of course formed in many ways: it develops within the family, school, church, at work and in our leisure hours. Traditionally, the good and useful habitual characteristics which are the outcome of this process have been called the ‘virtues’. Although these virtues are by definition always good, their usefulness depends on the requirements of the situation. So, for example, some of the virtues extolled by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, though they will help get us to Heaven, may be of less practical use in our business or civic lives. Consequently, when we urge a return to those traditional virtues — for example, thrift, self-discipline, responsibility, pride in and obligation to one’s community, what are sometimes called the ‘Victorian virtues’ — we are not necessarily suggesting that only mass re-evangelization will pull Western society together. After all, it was the ultra-humanistic ancient Greeks who originally identified the key or ‘cardinal’ virtues of temperance, fortitude, practical wisdom and justice in the first place.
That said, I find it difficult to imagine that anything other than Christianity is likely to resupply most people in the West with the virtues necessary to remoralize society in the very practical ways which the solution of many present problems requires. Although I have always resisted the argument that a Christian has to be a Conservative, I have never lost my conviction that there is a deep and providential harmony between the kind of political economy I favour and the insights of Christianity.
I tried to explain this connection in a speech at the church of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London in March 1978.
Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, some body of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family and the school. It will also destroy itself if it has no purpose. There is a well-known prayer which refers to God’s service as ‘perfect freedom’. My wish for the people of this country is that we shall be ‘free to serve’…
It appears to me that there are two very general and seemingly conflicting ideas about society which come down to us from the New Testament. There is that great Christian doctrine that we are all members one of another, expressed in the concept of the Church on Earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our inter-dependence, and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society.
That is one of the great Christian truths which has influenced our political thinking; but there is also another, that we are all responsible moral beings with a choice between good and evil, beings who are infinitely precious in the eyes of their Creator. You might almost say that the whole of political wisdom consists in getting these two ideas in the right relationship to each other.
96
‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ (1791),