Crime and punishment

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Focus The Story of Bonnie and Clyde The famous 1967 film told a story that was romantic, funny and violent. The truth was much less romantic and not very funny at all.

For Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker crime was an escape from poverty. They also loved the excitement and the publicity. But as they carried out their small-time robberies of small-town banks and cafes through the dark days of the Depression, they killed again and again. The end came on 23rd May, 1934. They died on the road with 187 bullets in their bodies.

Crime: its Causes

Many people have tried to find out why a person becomes a criminal. For example, one nineteenth-century theory said that criminals are born, not made, and that they have similar features such as large ears and a lot of hair on their bodies!

Modern theory, however, suggests that the environment helps to create the criminal.

The conditions in city slums explain the high level of crime there. Poverty often creates an unhappy family life for the young and a deep wish to escape to something more pleasant.

This often leads straight to drugs and theft. For example, the areas of any city in the USA with the poorest health and education services, the highest unemployment and poverty are also the areas with the highest crime figures and the highest numbers of police arrests.

The same slums were full of European immigrants and they are still the centres of crime.

But poverty is not the only cause of crime, as an experiment in California has shown, Some years ago a group of students, who all had "clean" driving licences, were asked to continue driving to and from college in the usual way, except for one thing: they were asked to put stickers on their cars which said 'Black Panther Party' (This is a militant black group which was fighting hard for black power) Just 17 days later the police had stopped the students a total of 30 times and two people had lost their licences. Obviously, the police did not invent the students' 'crimes': there had been small mistakes - the kind that most people who drive often make. So why had the police suddenly started to stop them all the time? It seems that policemen, who are only human, expect some types of people to break the law - people who support the Black Panthers, for example. They are immediately more suspicious of them.