Why do people start to commit crime? Is it because they are greedy? Or needy? Maybe it is their parents’ fault. Or perhaps due to starting to “mix with ‘the wrong crowd’”? Perhaps they have some sort of personality disorder which predisposes them to committing crime, or are psychopaths? Or maybe they just live where lots of other people routinely commit crimes and it is part of the culture they grow up in?
All of these are explanations which have been suggested as explanators of the onset of offending - something which in many (but not all) countries seems to occur at the point when young people start to gain some independence, but don’t yet have many of the responsibilities which come with adulthood (like jobs, being a parent or worrying about what other people might think of you). However, as part of a project which explored the relationships between politics and crime, but which used longitudinal data about individual offending over the life-course, evidence is starting to emerge which points the finger not at ‘stinking thinking’, poor parenting or hanging around with ‘ne’er’-do-wells’ but at the social and economic policies which a government pursues.
Taking the Thatcher governments as our case study, a small team of us started to try to figure out if the sorts of economic policies which Thatcher pursued had any impact on the rates with which people started to offend in their teenage years. This wasn’t an easy task as what we needed were two cohorts of people who had been interviewed repeatedly from a young age until they were well into their 30s or 40s and in which similar survey questions had been used.
As it turns out, Britain is about the only place in the World where this could be done.
Using the National Child Development Study (the NCDS), who were born in 1958, and the 1970 Birth Cohort Study, we were able to assess the extent to which the lives and life-courses of these two cohorts had been affected by the radical stance of the Thatcher governments (1979-1990, or 1997 if one includes John Major’s governments too). As it turns out, the timing of these births of these two cohorts was almost perfect for our analyses. The children born in the 1958 cohort were 21 years old when Thatcher was first elected, so had grown up under the post-War consensus. The 1970 cohort, on the other hand, were only 9 years old in 1979, so spent their formative years (from 9 to 20, or to nearly 30 if we bundle Major and Thatcher together) growing up in a climate in which the unemployment rate increased dramatically, social welfare was heavily cut back and other elements of the welfare state (such as goo quality council housing) were repeatedly called into question.
In this paper in the British Journal of Criminology, we ran identical structural equation models to assess if the loss of manufacturing jobs (aka economic restructuring) in the areas in which the children were living when they were about 3-13 for the 1958 births or 1-11 for the 1970 births was associated with them becoming alienated from school, starting to truant by the age of 16 and admitting to offending between the ages of 16 and 40. For the 1958 births, there was no evidence of economic restructuring ‘kick-starting’ this pathway into crime. The model had a really low level of explained variance (3%), and, tellingly, the data didn’t really fit the theoretical model well at all.
When we repeated this for the 1970 birth, the relationships between these variables were much stronger and the data fitted the model - and explained 11% of the variance.
We interpreted this as implying that for the kids who grew up during the Thatcher era, the loss of manufacturing jobs (in sectors like coal mining, steel production and heavy industry) in the areas in which they lived ‘kick-started’ feelings of alienation from school which led to truancy from school at 16 (since why bother to go to school if there were no jobs to go to?), which then led on to offending (since ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’ and little will produce ‘idle hands’ quite like not having a job or being in school). When the economic climate had been one in which there was a more seamless pathway from school to work and then on to bonds to conventional behaviours, fewer teenagers started to ‘drop out’ and to commit crime.
Then in this paper in Politics & Society, we assessed, using just the 1970 cohort, the extent to which local area economic restructuring was associated with harsher school disciple, being ‘at risk’ of harm, school alienation, family discord, offending at both 16 and 30 and being in a relationship or working in the cohort members’ 20s. It was. In some respects that wasn’t a surprise (since the model shared some variables with the earlier paper). What we also did in the Politics & Society paper was then to repeat this modelling not for the earlier cohort, but for different degrees of economic restructuring (four ‘levels’ of economic restructuring were used, based on the interquartile range). In areas in which there was very little economic restructuring, economic restructuring played little part. However in areas with the highest levels of economic restructuring, this was a major driver to offending, and explained almost half of the observed variance - which in social science modelling at the individual level is a huge amount of explained variance.
What are we to make of this? If one accepts the idea that the Thatcher governments’ economic policies pushed the UK’s manufacturing sector to breaking point (which was partly the point, as demonstrated by the 1984-85 miners’ strike) then rather than it being ‘bad people’ who committed crime (which peaked in the mid-1980s), it is more likely that it was ‘ordinary people’ who, out of frustration, anger, alienation or boredom, or a combination of all of these, started to vent their anger via violence, or sought to relieve their needs via theft.
In that sense, perhaps analysts need to pay more attention to what governments do rather than producing accounts which seek to blame individuals from relatively poor backgrounds who are pushed the breaking point.
The lessons of this for today’s political climate ought to escape no one.
