Crime and Punishment

Last Friday, I visited a German friend who had been a German language teacher in Penang in the last 10 years. Those 10 years saw her using an environmentally mode of transportation around Penang - a bicycle made for 1. 10 years went by with annoyances big and small albeit without major incident until 1 month before going back to Germany for good. After many near misses, she had her farewell encast with the most prominent features of Malaysian life - hurried motorists with harried minds and kiasu mentality. Suffering a broken leg, she sits in her front porch eagerly welcoming visitors. She might as well be watching a drama on a TV she doesn't own, for the day before, right in front of her, her German friend had her handbag snatched by 2 motorists pretending to be asking for directions. (Which, ought to raise a red flag, considering the fact that the lady had just alighted and it was a quiet neighborhood).

It has become a weekly affair to hear of snatch thefts victims among the expat families in Penang. Instead of the usual, "Why are people getting worse these days" question, I asked myself, "What's the difference between the people who will and who will not commit a crime, any crime."

I might sound a little fatalistic when I say that all crime is motivated by the dualistic element of incentives and punishments. I remember in one class where we had a topic about whether crime pays, I had said that none of us are as moral as we'd like to think. What becomes our moral yardstick is the programming we had growing up. Morality is not some innate thing which makes us more superior or righteous than another 'outright criminal'. Some people insist they will never steal, cheat, rob........ the way I used to insist that I would never resort to abortion or prostitution. Which is not to say I have, but the reason I haven't has little or nothing to do with a perceived standard of morality.

My motivations based on the scales of incentives/punishments just never reached a tipping scale where I had to resort to crime. I grew up in a society where there was genuine economic activity and I was raised in a family where everyone could read and write and where my father and the grandfather who raised him were professionals. From an early age, I had always had options to obtain gainful employment. And since I am a fairly educated, independent woman not bound mercilessly by the shackles of tradition and narrow-minded society, I had the education to be aware about sexual activity and its risk, as well as the ability to raise a child that would be conceived through any relationships. Not only do I know what I'm doing, I'm capable of figuring a way towards upwards mobility.

And if all these options which are products of my programming were not available to me, the probability of me being a crime statistic is about the same as anyone who's already made it into this year's index.

All of us tend to have a misplaced sense of righteousness about ourselves. That explains the incessant complaining and whining about crime and people who are more 'evil' than we are. The reason they are labelled 'evil' or 'criminal' is simply because we have another label where we are 'superior' and 'righteous'. It is the burden of the haves to take on an aware and engaged sense of social responsibility - and it is because of the "I take care of me" mentality those who have subscribe to which lends to the deterioration of society. All of us are comfortable in our jobs, meeting mortgages and loans and rent and bills and all the other activities that's making the world go round. We never think about the implications of the social and economic cocoon we live in, benefit from and the pedestal of moral righteousness we place ourselves on.

Why should we anyway....it's too inconvenient to care about anyone once we've labelled them "evil" and "criminal". The fact that people are "stupid", "criminal" and "evil" automatically negates our civic responsibility to look into the ways we could have created equitable treatment of all members of our society.

Given, there are simply those people with massive egos who think the world owes them a living - these are the grey-criminals, the leeches and parasites who also label themselves a class better than outright criminals. We cannot always justify someone's criminal act by saying it is the comple responsibility of society, eventhough I believe, a lot of the time, crime is a symptom of the inequality and decay in society and not the cause of.