Capital crime

“ I believe, every thief will confess, that he has been more than once seized and dismissed; and that he has sometimes ventured upon capital crimes, because he knew, that those whom he injured would rather connive at his escape, than cloud their minds with the horrours of his death.
All laws against wickedness are ineffectual, unless some will inform, and some will prosecute; but till we mitigate the penalties for mere violations of property, information will always be hated, and prosecution dreaded. ”

“ To deprive the more industrious or more happily placed of their hard-won earnings or possessions, inspires the bulk of modern serious crime. It no doubt has produced one peculiar feature in modern crime: the extensive scale on which it is carried out. The greatest frauds are now commonly perpetrated; great robberies are planned in one capital and executed in another. The whole is worked by wide associations of cosmopolitan criminals. ”

“ Crime is but little known, and capital offences almost never occur. Through the streets of the large capital at night any one may walk, not only safe from personal risk, but even from the least insult. ”

“ The truth is that when a bank-director lends the capital of shareholders to those to whom he would not lend his own capital, he is guilty of a breach of trust. In tracing the gradations of crime, we pass from direct robbery to robbery one, two, three, or more degrees removed. ”

“ It was proposed that capital offences should be reduced to—1st, high treason; 2nd, murder; 3rd, attempt to murder; 4th, burnings of buildings or ships; 5th, piracy; 6th, burglary; 7th, robbery; 8th, rape. Arson, piracy, burglary, and robbery were to be capital offences only when committed under circumstances or accompanied by acts directly calculated to endanger life. The setting fire to stacks would be no longer a capital offence: the crime, his lordship said, was no doubt a heinous one; but the severity of the punishment had the effect of deterring prosecutions. ”

“ It is equal to a tenth of the national expenditure, and every few years amounts to as much as the cost of a big European war. It is tempting to speculate on the admirable uses to which the capital consumed by crime might be devoted, if it were free for beneficent purposes. ”

“ But he will assuredly stand against crimes of unscrupulous cunning in the management of railway, industrial or financial corporations as resolutely as he would against crimes of brutal violence, and equally punish the rich man and the poor man, for crime is crime whether committed by a plutocracy or capitalist, a poor wage earner, or a mob. ”

“ In some countries - especially on the drug path, or on the trail of white slavery - crime is a major engine of economic growth.
As opposed to the visible sectors of the east's demonetized economies, criminal enterprises never run out of liquidity and thus are always keen to invest. ”

“ The recent direction of a great weight of public opinion against capital punishment is, I trust, the sign of an awakening perception that punishment is the last and worst instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime. ”

“ In what sense can a crime be a custom? In a fiscal sense. A crime is a source of revenue. In what sense should we wish to have our land free of crimes, free even, if this be possible, of larceny and homicide? In this sense:—we should wish that no money whatever should go out of our land, neither by way of rent, nor by way of tax, rate, toll, nor yet again by way of forisfactura, of payment for crime committed. ”

“ Into this vacuum - the interregnum between centrally planned and free market economies - crept crime. In most of these countries criminals run at least half the economy, are part of the governing elites (influencing them behind the scenes through money contributions, outright bribes, or blackmail) and - through the mechanism of money laundering - infiltrate slowly the legitimate economy. ”

“ But as a matter of fact—as modern criminology has proven beyond all dispute—the criminal is made, not born. He is the product of his environment, a child of poverty and desperation, of misery, greed, and ambition. He is at the same time the symbol and the proof of a diseased social condition, the miscarriage of perverted economic arrangements. Fully 97 per cent. of all crime is due directly to our economic institutions. ”

“ In east Europe, criminals on all levels, from the organized to the petty, often substituted for the dysfunctional, or ideologically hidebound organs of the state. Consider the dispensation of justice. The criminal code of conduct and court system replaced the compromised and lethargic official judiciary. Debt collectors and enforcers stood in for venal and incompetent police forces.
Crime is a growth industry and sustains hordes of professionals: accountants and lawyers, forgers and cross border guides, weapons experts and bankers, mechanics and hit-men. ”

“ The development of the capitalistic mode of production is not uniform; at times it is over-rapid, and then slows up again and undergoes crises that destroy the living of thousands and millions of individuals. If it is correct that modern criminality is a necessary consequence of the method of the production of wealth in capitalistic society, then the fluctuations of crime must correspond with the variations in production. The number of offenses must increase in times of crisis, and decrease when economic conditions improve ”

“ It is, therefore, plain that an increase in the wealth of a country is not necessarily followed by a decrease in the amount of crimes against property; that, in fact, the growth of national and individual wealth, unless it is accompanied by a corresponding development of ethical ideals, is apt to foster criminal instincts instead of repressing them.
If we look at crime in general, instead of that particular form of it which consists in offences against property, it will likewise become apparent that it is not so closely connected with poverty as is generally believed. ”

“ If there is any kind of crime that is the consequence of the economic environment exclusively, this is the one. Such crimes can arise only in a time like ours, with its insatiable thirst for gold, with the unlimited opportunity to deceive the public, greedy for great profits. A superficial knowledge of economic history is enough to make it plain that the bourgeois crimes, and especially those which we are now discussing, can be committed only under an economic system of the kind that ours is. ”

“ In too many major communities of our country, organized crime has become big business. It knows no state lines; it drains off millions of dollars of our national wealth, infecting legitimate businesses, labor unions, and even sports. Tolerating organized crime promotes the cheap philosophy that everything is a racket. ”

“ What gives crime the edge, the competitive advantage versus the older, ostensibly better established elites?
The free market does. Criminals are much better equipped to deal with the onslaught of this new conceptual beast, the mechanism of the market, than most other economic players in these tattered economies are.
Criminals, by the very nature of their vocation, were always private entrepreneurs. They were never state owned or subjected to any kind of central planning. Thus, they became the only group in society that was not corrupted by these un-natural inventions. ”

“ Crimes against persons increase a little when wages rise; but when this rise coincides with a low price of wine, they increase considerably.
The influence of strikes is exclusively limited to the crime of rebellion.
From the investigation into criminality and commercial occurrences we learn that fraudulent bankruptcy, and also forgery in great measure, are almost entirely independent of economic occurrences; and the fluctuations of the number of commercial crimes, in so far as they are not influenced by other economic facts, are explained in great part by commercial occurrences. ”

“ After having called attention to the great amount of recidivism among female delinquents, to the great increase of crime in our own day, and to the great percentage of young people among the criminals, the author closes with the following words: “Crime belongs in a society founded upon capitalism just as necessarily as do prostitution, [241] the destruction of countless human lives through economic exploitation, etc.” ”

“ Think it over and see if crime is not a more lucrative source of income to the 'dispensers of justice' than to the criminals themselves. Can you reasonably believe that they really want to abolish crime? ”

“ While, no doubt, there are agencies that conduct a thoroughly legitimate business, there are unquestionably numerous agencies in this country where one may employ thugs, thieves, incendiaries, dynamiters, perjurers, jury-fixers, manufacturers of evidence, strike-breakers and murderers. A regularly established commerce exists, which enables a rich man, without great difficulty or peril, to hire [282] abandoned criminals, who, for certain prices, will undertake to execute any crime. If one can afford it, one may have always at hand a body of highwaymen or a small private army. ”

“ In the laudable efforts which are now being made, and which ought to be made to heighten the material well-being of the community, it is a mistake to assume, as is too often done, that mere material prosperity, even if spread over the whole population, will ever succeed in banishing crime. A mere increase of material prosperity generates as many evils as it destroys; it may diminish offences against property, but it augments offences against the person, and multiplies drunkenness to an alarming extent. ”

“ Thus while the competitive system, by making money the main object of human existence, drives men to gambling and crime, we maintain an elaborate system of police courts, penitentiaries, and prisons for suppressing these things, although the experience of all recorded history demonstrates that these methods are totally ineffectual. ”

“ As to the stereotyped argument that government acts as a check on crime and vice, even the makers of law no longer believe it. This country spends millions of dollars for the maintenance of her "criminals" behind prison bars, yet crime is on the increase. Surely this state of affairs is not owing to an insufficiency of laws! Ninety per cent of all crimes are property crimes, which have their root in our economic iniquities. So long as these latter continue to exist we might convert every lamp-post into a gibbet without having the least effect on the crime in our midst. ”

“ Yet, under the panoply of these noble institutions and just laws of ours, one citizen of our commonwealth was enabled to seize from another millions of money and the ownership of a great enterprise—literally wrench it from the hands of men who had spent their lives in developing it—and the execution of the deed involved neither financial nor physical risk and carried with it no legal nor social consequences. ”

“ The story of these hired terrorists and of this ancient anarchy revived surpasses in cold-blooded criminality any other thing known in modern history. That rich and powerful patrons should be allowed to purchase in the market poor and desperate criminals eager to commit any crime on the calendar for a few dollars, is one of the most amazing and incredible anachronisms of a too self-complaisant Republic. ”

“ It exists to punish those crimes which, perchance, from their very magnitude, go unpunished by other courts of justice. It exists to judge and punish two classes of crime in especial: crimes committed for the love of money, by the man who seeks to enjoy labor's fruits, without sharing labor's works; crimes committed by the man who uses his wealth, or the accident of his social position, as the means of oppressing his fellow-creature, even the poorest and the meanest. ”

“ Meanwhile, the public is disturbed by these revelations, and wonders what financial irregularity will be brought to light next. The action of many corporate managers has seemed to indicate that they think little of violating the laws, and that, if they 932are broken by one high in authority, or in social life, immunity must be granted; or some subordinate be made to suffer instead of themselves. If a poor man commits a crime, he is sent to jail. ”

“ Thousands of falsehoods were coined and circulated by the capitalist press, shifting the blame of lawlessness and crime from the instigators to innocent men; the leaders were arrested without charges and jailed without trial, headquarters were broken up, a special grand jury was sworn in expressly to indict, a notorious capitalist union-hater being made foreman, and a hundred other flagrant violations of the law and outrages upon justice were committed in the name of law to defeat justice and enthrone corporate rapacity. ”

“ The crime of Amalgamated and its immediate consequences are before my readers. I have fulfilled the promise made in my foreword to expose to the people of America the manner in which they have been plundered and the methods by which the "System" habitually cheats them out of their savings. Robbery conducted on so gigantic a scale as I have pictured must necessarily simulate the natural processes of finance, and to understand the deep devices of the schemers requires a knowledge of banking and commercial practices which the average man has no chance to attain. ”