TRIGGERnometry - Theodore Dalrymple - The Truth About Crime

00:00:00.000 If you take, for example, the number of recorded crimes per prisoner in this country,

00:00:06.480 it's gone from six per prisoner in about 1910 or 1900 to 114 in 2000.

00:00:21.540 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:31.860 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:33.120 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:38.940 A fascinating guest we have for you today. He's an author, cultural critic, former prison physician and psychiatrist known best by his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple.

00:00:48.780 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:49.820 Thank you very much.

00:00:50.580 It's a pleasure. I promise to ruin your introduction. I think I just about got everything in.

00:00:55.180 You have had an extraordinary life and your work is very, very interesting.

00:01:00.740 Before we get into it, tell everybody about your background. Who are you? How are you where you are? How have you ended up here talking to us?

00:01:07.820 Well, I've ended up here talking to you because you invited me.

00:01:11.940 Right.

00:01:12.900 But I didn't break my way in or anything like that. But, well, I became a doctor.

00:01:18.820 I went to Africa. I had a great desire to see the world.

00:01:22.840 So, I spent quite a lot of my life touring the world.

00:01:26.900 When I was young, I had a slight attraction to danger.

00:01:31.000 And then I sort of settled down and was a psychiatrist and a prison doctor.

00:01:39.500 And one of the themes of your writings, I mean, we'll get into a lot of them, but one of the themes is a word that, you know, if you were to utter it in the confines of a normal TV studio, I think people would have a meltdown.

00:01:50.260 But it is a word that is important, which is responsibility.

00:01:54.580 It's something that you've written a lot about in the context of our culture.

00:01:57.960 What are we missing around that subject, do you think?

00:02:00.940 Well, I think there's a lot of double think going on in that people think they themselves are responsible, but they take away responsibility from other people.

00:02:09.840 So, they see other people as vectors of forces, if you like.

00:02:13.620 But, of course, no one can think of himself as a vector of forces until, that is, he has to make excuses for himself.

00:02:21.480 When, of course, he begins immediately to talk about being a vector of forces.

00:02:25.580 When you do something wrong, the first thing you think of is excuses for yourself.

00:02:30.120 And then, after a time, you realise that you're telling yourself porkies.

00:02:36.680 But sometimes, people don't get that far.

00:02:41.420 They deceive themselves.

00:02:43.400 And often, they're given, shall we say, advantages for deceiving themselves in that way.

00:02:49.300 So, they're both deceived and deceiving.

00:02:51.740 And yet, there's a still, small voice that tells them that this is not true.

00:02:56.380 That's my belief.

00:02:57.320 And you say that they get given incentives or get given rewards.

00:03:02.780 What do you mean by this?

00:03:03.860 Well, one of the, let me give you an illustration.

00:03:06.600 Once, I made a terrible mistake when calling a social worker because I had a patient.

00:03:10.580 I won't describe the patient.

00:03:11.960 But anyway, I said, this is a particularly deserving case.

00:03:15.020 Well, of course, deserving is not a word that you can use.

00:03:19.200 Because if there are deserving cases, there must be cases that are undeserving or at least less deserving.

00:03:25.080 And that means that you make a judgment.

00:03:28.200 And making a judgment is a very bad thing to do.

00:03:31.260 Though, actually, the idea of not making a judgment is itself a judgment.

00:03:35.740 So, it is a consequence of being a conscious human being, I think, that you make a judgment.

00:03:41.340 And the only way you don't make a judgment is by being unconscious.

00:03:44.780 So, we all do make judgments.

00:03:49.040 I don't know whether that works.

00:03:50.060 But we now pretend that we don't, is your point.

00:03:52.780 And what culturally, what sort of impact does that have, in your opinion, across our society when we adopt this way of looking at the world?

00:03:59.380 Well, I think it allows people to think that there's no other way than they don't have to make any effort to behave other than they are behaving.

00:04:08.700 And, in fact, there are quite a lot of people in the country, and this is a bad situation, who are no better off if they make an effort than if they don't make an effort.

00:04:19.740 They have nothing either to hope for or nothing to fear.

00:04:23.960 And that's an awful situation for a human being because it takes meaning out of life, meaning out of effort.

00:04:29.580 But, unfortunately, when you get to that situation, often you don't realise you're making decisions.

00:04:38.580 You are making decisions, but they're often highly irresponsible ones and foolish ones. 0.67

00:04:44.040 And you have been quite critical of the welfare state in some of your writings.

00:04:49.920 And that is, dare I say it, Anthony, a very controversial position.

00:04:55.040 What is your criticism of it?

00:04:56.760 Well, you see, I don't think, I wouldn't be critical of the welfare state.

00:05:00.920 I don't think the welfare state is, shall we say, a sufficient condition for what we're going through.

00:05:08.680 But it's a necessary condition.

00:05:10.060 When it's allied also to this kind of non-judgmentalism, where people don't think one thing is better than another, that's a recipe for disaster.

00:05:22.380 So, in some countries, where they have a welfare state actually better than ours, which, though it does actually make judgments, more judgments than ours, it's all right.

00:05:34.640 If the culture is all right, it could be all right.

00:05:37.560 So, it's not the welfare state in itself.

00:05:39.420 It's the welfare state in conjunction with cultural developments.

00:05:43.380 And what is the right of our culture?

00:05:45.900 Aren't we all right?

00:05:46.780 Aren't we doing okay?

00:05:49.540 Well, I mean, I suppose it depends which end of the telescope you're looking down, or whether you see the glass half full or half empty.

00:05:56.860 I would say that, I mean, my view is that behaviour in this country is worse than any other country that I know of comparable type.

00:06:08.220 And...

00:06:08.540 Behaviour, what are you talking about?

00:06:10.900 Well, the rudeness, the crudity, the litter.

00:06:13.920 Just take litter. 1.00

00:06:15.580 Britain is the most littered country in Western Europe.

00:06:19.140 What lies behind litter?

00:06:21.480 People throwing away stuff without due care, right?

00:06:24.560 Yes, but what lies behind that?

00:06:26.420 I would argue, and this is me being a miserable pessimist, a certain contempt, as in, I don't care.

00:06:34.660 Well, let's, I mean, yes, I agree.

00:06:38.400 And partly, I suppose, they don't even see it.

00:06:41.360 Or if they see it, they don't see that it means anything.

00:06:45.340 But I used to go walk every afternoon, or three afternoons a week, from my hospital to the prison next door,

00:06:55.640 which was a few hundred yards.

00:06:58.120 Two, I examined the litter on the way.

00:07:01.020 There was always litter.

00:07:02.160 What I discovered was an Englishman's street is his dining room.

00:07:06.420 And you see what they eat, you see what they throw away.

00:07:12.240 It's no wonder that there's an enormous amount of obesity, and so on and so forth.

00:07:17.440 The other thing I learned is that the fundamental cause of car crime is good weather.

00:07:22.680 Because when I went in the sunshine, there was glass glittering everywhere, cars broken into.

00:07:31.480 When it was cold or raining, there was no glass.

00:07:35.880 So I concluded from that, according to a kind of sociological thinking, that the real cause of crime, car crime, is good weather.

00:07:44.460 But anyway, this kind of degeneration is absolutely everywhere.

00:07:49.680 When you drive in this country, one thing I've noticed that was very, to me, interesting and significant,

00:07:55.740 is that after roadworks have been finished, nobody, neither the council nor presumably the contractor,

00:08:05.900 takes away the notices and lets the frame just rot.

00:08:10.260 And there are sandbags everywhere, but you don't see that in France, you don't see it in Spain.

00:08:14.960 It's because nobody has any pride in what they're doing.

00:08:19.500 The council doesn't do it.

00:08:20.620 The council, well, I won't talk about council, but they're not interested in that.

00:08:27.280 That's beneath them, of course, because they're trying to reform human nature rather than pick up the litter. 0.99

00:08:33.200 Boom.

00:08:33.680 So you mentioned reforming human nature.

00:08:36.260 Yes.

00:08:36.620 Now that is interesting to me.

00:08:38.060 Let's talk about that, because we're having this sort of slightly theoretical conversation about a few things

00:08:44.080 that are maybe indicative of this and that.

00:08:46.500 Yes.

00:08:47.000 Let's get to the core of it.

00:08:48.740 Yes.

00:08:49.160 When you talk about councils trying to reform human nature, what do you mean?

00:08:53.180 Well, they're trying to make people better than they are.

00:08:57.880 And they're more interested in, if I may say so, political correctness, many of them, than in doing the things that councils are supposed to do,

00:09:09.220 which is look after the towns and cities.

00:09:12.480 My council does all kinds of things which you shouldn't be doing.

00:09:17.300 But it doesn't do those things which it should be doing.

00:09:20.860 This is fairly typical of our government.

00:09:26.740 And it seems to be worse in this country than other countries.

00:09:31.080 Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

00:09:32.920 I'm very keen on this point, because I think it strikes to the core of some of the things that you believe.

00:09:40.280 And people might be watching and saying, well, isn't it the job of councils to create the right incentive structure to make people better than, quote, they are, as you put it?

00:09:48.120 No, no.

00:09:49.020 They're there to sweep the street.

00:09:54.220 And if they don't do that, they can't do that properly.

00:09:57.460 Well, I don't want them to change human nature.

00:10:00.360 Of course, you can give people incentives.

00:10:02.560 As we've talked about, you can give people incentives to make them better or worse, or at least not to make them better or worse.

00:10:11.100 Not to change human nature, but to make it that behaving badly has no consequences, or no apparent consequences.

00:10:19.520 It does have consequences, because, you know, you can't escape bad consequences.

00:10:25.100 But not immediate bad consequences for ability to eat, or have a roof over your head, or anything like that.

00:10:34.680 So, we get all kinds of nonsense now about people changing sex, and so on and so forth.

00:10:41.960 And you see what happened to the professor of philosophy.

00:10:46.700 She was in that chair a week ago.

00:10:48.120 Oh, right.

00:10:48.560 Well, she was saying things which I would have thought 20 years ago no one would have thought worth saying, because it was so self-evident.

00:10:56.740 And now she's been persecuted for them.

00:11:00.400 It's true.

00:11:01.740 She has been persecuted for them.

00:11:03.840 Was there a particular moment, Anthony, where you started to see culture and the world changing, or do you think it's been a gradual, slow creep?

00:11:12.500 Well, you could never point to a, I mean, you can't say that, like Virginia Woolf said, human nature changed on the 11th of November 1910, or something like that.

00:11:22.400 Of course, it didn't really mean that.

00:11:24.080 And you can't point to anything like that.

00:11:26.240 If you start thinking like that, then you go back to the Garden of Eden.

00:11:30.320 So, obviously, if you said, is there a point at which I saw culture changing, no, but it gradually dawned on me.

00:11:44.180 And I suppose my experience of working as a doctor in a slum and in a prison did open my eyes.

00:11:56.300 Because most people in my situation, middle-class situation, wouldn't even know that any of this existed.

00:12:02.820 And, in fact, once I was asked by a BBC correspondent, actually, a very nice man, a very distinguished man, actually.

00:12:12.140 And he said, well, do you make it all up, what I was writing?

00:12:15.760 That explains, like, the last 10 years in one sentence, doesn't it?

00:12:31.600 So, I mean, how he could have avoided seeing it, I don't know.

00:12:34.620 But people doing, I mean, there's a book in France, I mean, it's not only in Britain.

00:12:38.560 There's a book just out in recent, fairly recently, out in France called The French Archipelago.

00:12:43.500 And it's written by a geographical sociologist, or whatever you would call him, who says that now people are living in, we're balkanized, our own societies.

00:12:56.340 So, people outside that group, and these groups are quite large.

00:13:01.220 I mean, if you take the Bobo, the bourgeois bohemians, there are now hundreds of thousands or millions of them.

00:13:07.900 So, there's no reason why they should meet anyone outside their circle.

00:13:11.540 And likewise, people who live in some terrible housing estate somewhere probably never meet anybody who doesn't live in a, except in, you know, if they're working in a supermarket or something like that.

00:13:27.480 So, we live in a world in which we don't meet many people who are not like ourselves.

00:13:34.800 And I was privileged to meet people who are not like myself, who were living a very different life from me.

00:13:41.260 And I was interested, and I think one thing that helped me was having traveled a lot around the world.

00:13:48.060 And one time, for example, I crossed Africa by public transport.

00:13:53.260 And really, all judgment is comparative.

00:13:57.520 So, having seen that, having seen, for example, how really poor people are, I mean, I'm not talking about not having all the things they want.

00:14:07.720 I mean, they really had very little indeed and might not even have had enough to, couldn't be sure that they would have enough to eat the next week or month.

00:14:17.060 And I saw that these people were actually dignified, polite, and in some ways more civilized than people in this country.

00:14:30.660 What do you mean by that?

00:14:32.320 Well, they behaved in a more seemly way.

00:14:35.660 Yeah.

00:14:35.900 And I found that pretty amazing.

00:14:41.920 Even though they had less, they had far more dignity with the way that they behaved than with people here.

00:14:47.960 And why do you think that is?

00:14:49.820 Do you think because we indulge people here, do you think it's because we're more spoiled as a society?

00:14:57.080 Is it something to do with culture?

00:14:58.040 Well, I mean, I suppose I would be spoiled, really.

00:15:01.160 I mean, we're all spoiled, let's be fair.

00:15:02.760 Yes, so, but I think people don't really know what that kind of hardship is.

00:15:13.740 As they, I mean, it's not that long ago that people did know that kind of hardship in this country.

00:15:19.460 But anyway, I think people take a lot more for granted.

00:15:24.840 And those people didn't take anything for granted.

00:15:27.240 They couldn't take anything for granted.

00:15:28.480 I mean, it's not that I advocate going back to living in that kind of poverty or anything like that.

00:15:35.760 But that meant that poverty is not a simple phenomenon that impacts on human personality.

00:15:45.400 There must be something else.

00:15:46.480 I guess what you're getting at is in the West, we have the notion that crime, misbehaviour, whatever other behaviours that we don't like and don't want to encourage, people are often saying that it's a product of poverty.

00:15:58.640 And your argument is...

00:16:00.260 It's not.

00:16:01.380 I mean, it's...

00:16:02.560 Well, you couldn't know that from statistics in Britain.

00:16:08.800 I mean, when Britain was a lot poorer, it had a lot less crime.

00:16:14.720 I mean, the level of crime has shot up immensely since Edwardian times.

00:16:22.100 Now, people will say, well, of course, the statistics, you can't judge by the statistics because they're kept differently and so on.

00:16:28.340 And there are reasons both for thinking that there was more crime than was recorded then, but also there's a lot of reasons for thinking there's much more crime than is recorded now here.

00:16:38.760 Yeah. So, I mean, in general, one can say pretty certainly that there's a huge amount of crime.

00:16:46.020 I mean, it goes up and down, of course, from year to year, but there's an immense amount of crime by comparison with what there was before the First World War and even before the Second World War.

00:17:00.400 I mean, I've forgotten the exact figure, but there's a sort of more robberies in one London borough in a month than in the whole of Great Britain in 1930.

00:17:12.200 So, I mean, it's anyone who can remember knows that this is so.

00:17:18.200 Of course, they've been, again, they've been condescended to by criminologists who tell them that it's the fear of crime rather than crime itself.

00:17:25.880 But that's simply not so.

00:17:28.000 And why has this happened?

00:17:30.400 Ah, that is a difficult question.

00:17:32.320 Right.

00:17:33.820 And I'm not sure.

00:17:35.660 I can't say, well, I know this is the, here is the answer.

00:17:40.300 Give us some pointers.

00:17:45.140 Well, for one thing, there's very little repression of crime.

00:17:54.060 The criminal justice system is incredibly lax.

00:17:57.700 And people think that we're hard on crime.

00:18:00.740 We're not at all hard on crime.

00:18:02.160 And every government that has tried to do something about it has been stopped by forces that are beyond their control.

00:18:14.400 But if you take, for example, the number of recorded crimes per prisoner in this country, it's gone from six per prisoner in about 1910 or 1900 to 114 in 2000.

00:18:38.420 By comparison with six.

00:18:39.420 By comparison with six.

00:18:44.260 Jesus Christ.

00:18:46.040 So I worked this out from the statistics.

00:18:49.300 This is known to the police.

00:18:51.360 Okay.

00:18:51.580 So in other words, you can commit as many crimes as you want, in other words, pretty much.

00:18:58.840 Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as that.

00:19:02.140 And it depends on...

00:19:03.140 You're right, Anthony.

00:19:03.960 You're right.

00:19:04.280 If you commit murder, you probably go to prison.

00:19:06.060 My point is, if you're allowed to commit 114 crimes, that's not the state attempting to keep you from doing that.

00:19:13.740 It's not really, no.

00:19:15.580 The state is failing in one of its primary duties.

00:19:19.340 And that is to keep people more or less safe as they go about their legal...

00:19:24.280 Now, the point is that people like you and me don't suffer much from this.

00:19:30.520 But I used to...

00:19:31.380 In the morning, I used to hear the stories of people who had been the victims of crime.

00:19:35.620 And in the afternoon, I would go and see the people who committed the crime.

00:19:38.920 And I, you know, I actually got on.

00:19:41.260 I think I liked the prisoners.

00:19:44.260 And they told me, of course, what they'd actually done by comparison to what they'd been charged with having done.

00:19:51.520 And it was a very different story.

00:19:55.680 And because they knew I wasn't going to tell anybody.

00:19:58.360 I mean, not specifically.

00:19:59.880 I've told...

00:20:00.840 I'm telling you in general terms where I wouldn't say this particular prison did this and that.

00:20:06.900 And all of them had done between 5 and 20 times as much as they were in court for doing.

00:20:12.880 And the figures bear this out.

00:20:17.980 I mean, the number of crimes that are actually solved in the sense they find out who did it and charge them is something like 5 or 8%.

00:20:31.220 And when they are charged, nothing much happens to them.

00:20:36.360 It's easier, apparently, to find someone who has been convicted 40 times in prison than to find someone who has been convicted only once.

00:20:45.720 Wow.

00:20:46.080 So, and when you consider that someone who has been convicted 40 times has probably done between 5 and 20 times as much as he's been charged with,

00:20:58.100 you realise that, you know, that things are not working out very well.

00:21:05.060 In a way, I would say, this is grounds for optimism.

00:21:10.720 Because when you consider how pathetic our efforts at repressing crime are, the fact is there isn't much crime.

00:21:19.680 I mean, we're not...

00:21:21.340 I don't know about you, but I'm not tortured by crime or anything like that.

00:21:25.880 I assume when I go down the street I'm safe and so on and so forth.

00:21:29.440 I mean, it's not true, it depends where you live.

00:21:33.020 But actually, the question is not why there is so much crime, but why there is so little.

00:21:38.060 And that means that most people, fundamentally, are law-abiding.

00:21:42.460 What is a reason for pessimism is that, theoretically, it should be easy to reduce the crime rate very considerably,

00:21:50.080 and yet we consistently refuse to do it.

00:21:52.600 Hmm. And why do we consistently refuse to do it?

00:21:57.020 Because most people think that if you regard punishment as any part of the criminal justice system,

00:22:05.020 you're a torturer or a sadist. 0.81

00:22:09.380 And the truth is? 0.77

00:22:11.840 And the truth is that I don't think...

00:22:15.780 I'm not advocating bad treatment of anybody,

00:22:17.980 but I think that the extreme...

00:22:22.160 When we have a Lord Chief Justice who says that first-time burglars shouldn't be sent to prison,

00:22:27.260 he says they're first-time burglars.

00:22:29.120 That already shows he has no idea what he's dealing with

00:22:32.160 because the chances are they're not first-time burglars.

00:22:35.280 That's the first thing.

00:22:36.240 So he doesn't know what he's talking about.

00:22:37.580 They're first-time convicts for a burglary.

00:22:39.500 They're first-time convictions.

00:22:41.020 You must always remember that a conviction is not the same as the number of offences.

00:22:46.440 And this is a very simple thing.

00:22:50.940 The other thing that people forget is when they think,

00:22:55.240 oh, well, he's middle class and so on and so on.

00:22:57.660 It's easy for him to talk.

00:22:59.060 He's had an easy life and all that.

00:23:01.220 They don't know whether I've had an easy life or not, of course.

00:23:04.040 But anyway, they can say that.

00:23:06.220 And they say that criminals on the whole have had hard lives.

00:23:10.740 And that's true.

00:23:12.280 Many of them have had hard lives.

00:23:14.640 But the fact is that the victims of crime are also poor.

00:23:21.460 And since the number of victims is much larger than the number of perpetrators,

00:23:26.340 failing to incapacitate the perpetrators is creating lots of victims.

00:23:34.940 And for poorer people who are not themselves criminals, because poverty is not criminal,

00:23:42.480 it makes their life much, much harder.

00:23:45.680 So in many ways, what we're failing to do is we're failing to protect the poorest and most vulnerable people in society

00:23:52.820 by these policies or methods or whatever you might want to call them.

00:23:56.660 Exactly.

00:23:56.840 But, you see, what it enables people like me, if I were of a different opinion,

00:24:03.220 and I probably would have been of a different opinion if I hadn't worked amongst this for so long,

00:24:08.780 is that it enables them to think well about themselves, their being generous and so on,

00:24:15.100 when they're not actually, of course, I mean, you could say, well, it's the means by which the middle class

00:24:21.800 avoid having to pay more tax for a proper criminal justice system.

00:24:26.800 And when you look at the people who are perpetrating the crimes,

00:24:31.200 is there a type, as it were, or is it just every different?

00:24:36.260 Could be a personality type, not necessarily come from...

00:24:41.760 I never really, never really thought that.

00:24:46.000 I mean, obviously, you read, of course, that in prisons,

00:24:49.660 that 70% of prisoners have some kind of psychological problem or psychiatric problem.

00:24:58.040 I believe that's a whole load of hokum. 1.00

00:24:59.820 And that is an excuse for the failure to deal with the relatively few raving lunatics in prison, 0.96

00:25:07.300 which the NHS is incapable of dealing with, because it's so incompetent. 0.56

00:25:12.780 And we've closed down all the psychiatric hospitals, so you can't send the lunatics anywhere.

00:25:18.360 And you're not allowed, in a way, rightly, you're not allowed to treat them in prison against their will, 0.77

00:25:23.800 so they just stay there and rot.

00:25:25.340 But you cover up that deficiency, which is a real and, in my view,

00:25:31.880 should be an easily soluble problem, because it's not a huge problem.

00:25:38.140 You cover that up by saying, well, there's 70% of them.

00:25:41.100 Well, what can you do with 70% of 80,000 people?

00:25:44.200 I mean, you can't do anything, you know.

00:25:46.420 But the whole process of diagnosis is so lax, and that you can claim these things,

00:25:54.480 and nobody will bat an eyelid saying, well, this can't be true.

00:25:59.240 Anthony, so I was a teacher for many years, and I read a stat, and correct me if I'm wrong,

00:26:05.360 maybe it is wrong, I think I read it in the Times as an educational supplement,

00:26:08.640 so we can blame them if it's wrong.

00:26:09.880 But something like 50% of all prisoners have a special educational need,

00:26:14.340 whether it's dyslexic, whether it's, you know, things...

00:26:17.500 I don't believe that for a minute.

00:26:20.060 And it is said that prisoners are, on average, of lower IQ than the general population.

00:26:30.040 That may or may not be so.

00:26:32.320 But I found that I never had to talk to the prisoners in any different way from how I'm speaking to you.

00:26:38.540 Now, that might be...

00:26:40.540 I mean, there's more than one possible interpretation of that.

00:26:50.100 But my interpretation was that they were not deficient in intelligence,

00:26:55.160 they could understand everything perfectly well,

00:26:57.840 and I never had to alter what I was saying.

00:27:00.420 I mean, of course, there were a few who were very noticeably of low intelligence,

00:27:07.240 and there were some who were mad,

00:27:09.320 and there were a few who were a bit like Hannibal Lecter,

00:27:13.580 but they were very few.

00:27:16.880 And generally speaking,

00:27:19.060 I found them to be a perfectly adequate intelligence.

00:27:23.240 That's very interesting.

00:27:24.020 You know, Anthony, I feel listening to you a bit like a four-year-old talking to his dad,

00:27:28.720 and every question is, why, why, why this, why that?

00:27:31.060 Because you're opening up boxes that we've not looked in on this show.

00:27:37.620 So you've worked in a prison, you've worked with people in that situation.

00:27:43.000 Just what are the things that people don't understand?

00:27:45.780 What are the things, the myths that we keep being told?

00:27:48.160 What are the things that we ought to understand about the prison system,

00:27:51.580 prisoners, criminal justice, all of that?

00:27:53.740 Well, I think, I mean, people, for example,

00:27:58.580 people will often give you a statistic saying that we have more prisoners per head

00:28:03.800 than you've probably heard this in any other country in Europe,

00:28:06.340 which is only barely true because Spain has almost as many. 0.91

00:28:12.180 But the statistic, the number of prisoners per head, is a ridiculous one

00:28:16.660 because, of course, you're not, there isn't an ideal statistic.

00:28:21.360 Every country must have 100 prisoners per million.

00:28:25.940 It's not a target, irrespective of the number of crimes.

00:28:30.160 I mean, if there were no crimes, then even to have one prisoner would be an outrage.

00:28:35.100 So the fact that I've never heard anybody say that that statistic is ridiculous,

00:28:40.540 it means nothing.

00:28:42.920 It's only by comparison with the number of crimes that it makes any sense.

00:28:46.520 And the fact is that this is the most crime-ridden country in Western Europe by far.

00:28:52.300 Wow.

00:28:52.780 So the fact that we have slightly more people in prison per head of population

00:28:56.620 actually points to the fact that not enough people are...

00:28:59.480 The last time I looked at Eurostat, and admittedly it didn't have the latest statistics,

00:29:05.200 but the number of violent crimes per prisoner in Spain was a fifth or a sixth of what it is in England.

00:29:17.980 In other words, if you commit a violent crime in Spain,

00:29:21.140 you're five or six times more likely to go to prison than you are in England.

00:29:24.420 And only a criminologist would be surprised to learn that the rate of criminal violence in Spain

00:29:33.000 is much lower than in Britain.

00:29:35.800 You have to have a certain level of education to be surprised by that.

00:29:41.320 I mean, you probably are not all that surprised.

00:29:45.280 No.

00:29:45.380 I don't know.

00:29:46.300 Thank you for that.

00:29:47.320 We're very badly educated, as you point out.

00:29:49.740 But again, I come back to the why question.

00:29:53.280 You made one point, which is, as a culture, we have become uncomfortable with the idea of punishment.

00:30:00.060 And I feel that.

00:30:01.880 I feel that in myself.

00:30:03.040 I feel that even when I was growing up, the idea that people respond to incentives

00:30:08.920 and punishment is a disincentive or an incentive, depending on the circumstances,

00:30:14.320 was universally understood.

00:30:15.980 And by the way, sometimes that principle was misapplied.

00:30:19.940 And the punishment was far too severe for people.

00:30:23.560 The way children were treated was just outright wrong in many ways.

00:30:27.880 Right?

00:30:28.340 People, you know, physical punishment and all these sorts of things.

00:30:31.140 I would argue are wrong.

00:30:34.500 Why has that changed?

00:30:37.540 I don't know.

00:30:38.400 But let me just go back a minute.

00:30:40.580 No one wants a society in which the only reason that people behave reasonably well

00:30:45.900 is because there's a policeman around every corner.

00:30:48.600 And if he doesn't behave well, then...

00:30:51.120 They get nicked.

00:30:51.920 They get nicked.

00:30:52.980 So you've got to try and distinguish what prevents people from becoming criminals in the first place

00:30:59.260 is what you do once they have become criminal, once they start behaving criminally.

00:31:04.460 And these two questions, they overlap a bit, but they're not exactly the same.

00:31:09.820 And they are confounded.

00:31:11.740 So whenever people will say, well, what's the root cause of crime?

00:31:15.720 And the root cause of crime, of course, strictly speaking, is the decision to commit it.

00:31:20.820 A very unfashionable view nowadays.

00:31:25.680 In fact, there can't be any crime without a decision to take.

00:31:28.980 Because if you don't take the decision, you're not criminally responsible.

00:31:31.640 So in other words, although it sounds trivial, it is actually the case.

00:31:37.800 And I always treated people as if they had made decisions.

00:31:41.080 There might have been very bad decisions. 1.00

00:31:42.940 There might be stupid decisions. 1.00

00:31:45.880 They were forgivable sometimes, not always. 1.00

00:31:49.940 Although I don't like the word forgivable.

00:31:51.760 I would say either excusable or comprehensible.

00:31:57.640 Because I can't, if someone does something wrong to you, I can't forgive him.

00:32:02.720 Only you can do that.

00:32:04.560 I have no locus standar in that situation.

00:32:08.280 But anyway, so people, and it's perfectly true that it's difficult to be in favour of punishment

00:32:18.160 because punishment has been terribly harsh in the past and cruel and sadistic, actually.

00:32:25.900 And, you know, when it was carried out in public, half as deterrence and half as entertainment,

00:32:35.120 that was horrible.

00:32:36.460 And, you know, one doesn't want to.

00:32:38.640 On the other hand, one has to be realistic.

00:32:40.660 So that, for example, the reason you don't park on a double yellow line is not because you...

00:32:48.400 It's because I'm going to get a fine.

00:32:51.100 Yeah, you're going to get a fine.

00:32:51.940 That's why I don't park there.

00:32:53.020 Yes, yes, yes.

00:32:53.500 And if I didn't get a fine, I would park there.

00:32:55.500 Probably.

00:32:56.240 Guaranteed.

00:32:56.740 In my case, definitely.

00:32:57.700 I mean, you knew two things.

00:32:58.920 The chances of you getting the ticket in the first place and then having to pay the fine.

00:33:04.560 If it was just the ticket, if they just told you, as the police now tell you, if you just

00:33:10.040 assault someone or something, don't do it again, well, it doesn't matter.

00:33:15.060 I mean, you've been caught, but it doesn't matter.

00:33:17.420 Whereas with the ticket, it does matter because you will be fined.

00:33:22.600 So, yes.

00:33:27.420 We started with, the question I was asking you is why we've become uncomfortable about

00:33:34.360 applying punishment.

00:33:35.760 I think there's been a long process of propaganda, probably starting with, I mean, if you have

00:33:42.740 to put a start on this, I'm not saying that, you know, someone will come and say, well,

00:33:47.020 there was before that.

00:33:48.320 But if you take the Fabians, for example, take someone like Bernard Shaw, would write about,

00:33:54.420 would write about criminology.

00:34:00.360 And he would argue all the things that I now oppose.

00:34:05.640 Now, he was living in a society in which crime was actually a very minor problem.

00:34:11.200 But he didn't know that.

00:34:12.600 He couldn't have known that because he didn't know that it was going to explode later.

00:34:17.600 So many reformers, I think, do not consider the possibility that they make things happen.

00:34:24.420 worse rather than better.

00:34:26.460 As they can make, they can make things better, but they can also make things worse.

00:34:30.920 And I've just been to an exhibition at the Wellcome Gallery, a Wellcome Institute.

00:34:36.340 Yeah.

00:34:38.160 And it's about happiness.

00:34:40.800 And they were saying how political activism can make you happier.

00:34:45.840 And it can make things better.

00:34:49.400 Well, that is truth.

00:34:51.660 It can make things better, but it can also make things worse.

00:34:55.420 Because they gave an illustration of how, you know, marching in the streets and so on and so on.

00:34:59.940 It exactly fitted the Nazis. 0.86

00:35:03.000 You know.

00:35:03.540 Now, so there's an example of how activism can make things a lot worse.

00:35:09.520 And this doesn't seem to be a problem for activists.

00:35:19.420 I don't think many think, well, actually, things might get worse as well as better.

00:35:24.220 And nobody, and Dr. Johnson said that all judgment is comparative.

00:35:27.940 Now, what they compare everything with is some kind of utopian vision that they have in their mind,

00:35:34.640 not with what actually exists and what has existed and what could possibly exist.

00:35:40.580 So they're not very good at making judgments.

00:35:45.300 People are not very good at making judgments.

00:35:47.440 And, Anthony, why am I always hearing this statistic about you say that crime has exploded,

00:35:51.720 that violent crime is going down, that society isn't as violent as it used to be?

00:35:56.900 Oh, well, that might well be true.

00:35:59.440 I mean, it depends.

00:36:00.660 You see, you cannot, it depends where, what you look at.

00:36:06.140 So how you look at it.

00:36:07.340 I mean, my financial advisor will always show you that your investments are doing very well.

00:36:12.820 It depends.

00:36:14.020 He carefully selects the dates from which the graph starts.

00:36:19.660 Yes, I take your point.

00:36:21.500 So it might well be.

00:36:23.060 I mean, if our crime rate halved, first of all, incidentally, there's abundant evidence of manipulation of the criminal statistics.

00:36:35.040 I'll give you an example in a minute.

00:36:37.760 But it could go down by half and still be incredibly much higher than it was in 1910.

00:36:45.960 And now you can say, well, what's the standard of comparison?

00:36:49.180 I'm not saying that it's not a good thing if the crime rate goes down.

00:36:52.660 Of course, we would all welcome that.

00:36:54.920 But it's still very high.

00:36:57.860 So what was the example you were going to give about this?

00:36:59.740 Oh, well, I was going to give up this manipulation.

00:37:01.460 Well, you've probably heard about the recidivism rate of non-custodial versus custodial sentences.

00:37:11.520 And that's always been an extremely crooked statistic.

00:37:14.060 Because, of course, it starts from the period of release of the prisoner and the date of sentencing of the non-custodial sentence.

00:37:31.700 Well, of course, while the prisoner is in prison, he's not committing crimes unless he's committing them against other prisoners, which can happen, of course.

00:37:41.740 But it doesn't happen that often.

00:37:44.060 So that in itself is a crooked comparison.

00:37:47.820 Secondly, the people who are in prison have all been through the non-custodial system because they don't go into it.

00:37:54.800 It's very rare that someone, except for a crime like murder, goes into prison the first time he's convicted.

00:38:01.600 So he's been through the whole mill of rehabilitation and so on before he ever gets to prison.

00:38:07.220 But anyway, they used to use a two-year comparison.

00:38:14.060 And suddenly, and they used to call it reconviction rate.

00:38:20.440 And then they changed it to re-offending rate, which is a lie in itself because the re-offending rate is not the same as the reconviction rate.

00:38:29.160 Committing an offence and being convicted for it.

00:38:32.140 It's not the same thing.

00:38:33.340 Right.

00:38:33.540 And it will never be the same thing.

00:38:36.400 And it certainly won't be the same thing with our police.

00:38:38.520 So we're looking for the keys where the light is as opposed to where we drop them, essentially, on that particular issue.

00:38:45.580 And the fact is that you have to look at the statistics with extreme scepticism.

00:38:53.620 And they make it very difficult.

00:38:56.240 You know, so suddenly they change from a two-year period to a three-month period.

00:39:02.320 Well, how on earth are you supposed to compare whether things are getting better, worse, or staying the same?

00:39:07.120 You can't.

00:39:08.000 It becomes impossible.

00:39:09.080 And Anthony, the one thing that I really wanted to talk to you about is the rehabilitation of prisoners.

00:39:16.820 Is it effective or are we just creating a system where someone goes into prison, you effectively lock them in for 11 hours of the day, however long it is,

00:39:25.540 and they come away learning nothing from the experience or anything actually worse?

00:39:30.500 No, it's not true that they get worse.

00:39:33.200 And actually, again, prisoners rehabilitate themselves in a certain way because if you look at the age at which prisoners come into prison for a new sentence for crime, not sexual crimes, but crimes such as burglary or assault,

00:39:51.420 they stop spontaneously before they're 40.

00:39:57.220 Really?

00:39:57.740 Yeah.

00:39:58.300 So they're very, very few.

00:39:59.820 I mean, there are some, of course.

00:40:00.940 But the idea that they go on and on for the rest of their lives is not true.

00:40:06.260 Or at least they don't get caught after the age of...

00:40:09.980 They've worked out how to get past the system.

00:40:12.940 That's the advantage of being a veteran.

00:40:16.180 So that suggests that they are self-rehabilitating.

00:40:20.560 And that, of course, I mean, would lead some people to say, well, there's a biological component.

00:40:25.640 That's what I was going to say.

00:40:26.520 Which is probably true, a reduction in, maybe a reduction in testosterone aggression.

00:40:34.620 But also, I mean, the fact is it's a young mind's game.

00:40:37.840 If you want to run away, it's better to be young than old, as I can tell you from experience.

00:40:44.380 Not that I'm running away from anything, but I couldn't run away from anything very much.

00:40:48.860 So, but anyway, so the idea of rehabilitation is, and it's not as if it hasn't been tried.

00:40:58.080 I mean, it's been tried, but it doesn't seem to work.

00:41:03.120 And except in the sense that people eventually, and that's a good thing, of course,

00:41:08.760 that they eventually get over their life of crime.

00:41:12.320 And presumably they find jobs and things like that.

00:41:16.760 And I'm all in favour of that, of course.

00:41:19.520 And what do you think about the whole having to disclose criminal records?

00:41:23.240 Do you think that actually stops people from rehabilitating, re-entering into society?

00:41:28.080 Or do you think it's a good thing?

00:41:29.900 You mean for job applications?

00:41:30.860 Yeah, for job applications.

00:41:31.640 I face both ways there.

00:41:34.760 I mean, I'm in favour of, of course, allowing people a second chance and even a third chance

00:41:43.100 or a 48th chance in some cases.

00:41:48.080 And so I can understand why one shouldn't.

00:41:53.060 But on the other hand, if I'm employing someone in my, to do my accounts,

00:41:59.580 I would want to know that he was a convicted embezzler.

00:42:02.880 So I think it's a difficult, if you like, as an example of how there is no perfect solution

00:42:10.460 to that particular problem.

00:42:13.020 I mean, ideally, what you would like is for people to know and to want to give people a chance.

00:42:20.680 It's your decision that you say, you take this person, you're prepared to take the chance

00:42:26.260 that he's, that he's reformed, but, or changed.

00:42:33.680 But I, I, I don't see a simple solution to that, a simple rule that a rule will,

00:42:43.020 if you make a rule, it'll be hard on, on somebody.

00:42:47.940 Yes.

00:42:48.160 And, and we're talking about rehabilitation and we're talking about reintegrating people.

00:42:53.660 What do we do with people who have offences, sexual offences?

00:43:00.440 And how do you reintegrate those types of people into society?

00:43:04.340 Because that is a, that is a question for the ages.

00:43:07.460 Because when someone goes in for a sex-based offence, a lot of the time,

00:43:12.820 and you could argue quite rightly, their career is finished,

00:43:16.040 their reputation is destroyed, is there ever a way to reintegrate those people back into society? 1.00

00:43:22.200 Or is...

00:43:22.720 Well, again, I mean, I think it's the same answer, isn't it?

00:43:26.000 You want those people, you don't want people, I mean,

00:43:29.100 you don't want people automatically to have a life sentence.

00:43:31.800 On the other hand, you can understand why people don't want someone like that living next door to him.

00:43:43.660 So I'm not sure, I think we, there's no simple answer to that.

00:43:50.160 But also we have to, we have to get the, the, um, a sense of proportion in that this really is not a huge, vast problem

00:44:04.400 like some other things are a big, a much bigger problem.

00:44:10.320 Before, I was going to ask you another why question, but let's stick with that.

00:44:14.560 When you say it's not a huge problem, you mean statistically speak?

00:44:17.900 Statistically.

00:44:18.020 Comparatively, obviously to the individual victim.

00:44:20.220 Oh, yeah, of course.

00:44:20.840 I just wanted to clarify that.

00:44:21.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:44:22.320 In case some idiot... 1.00

00:44:23.360 I mean, the, the, uh, um, I remember, you can easily look very callous by saying it's not a big problem 1.00

00:44:33.060 because then somebody comes along and says, well, it happened to me.

00:44:36.240 Yes.

00:44:37.460 And I had a colleague who was caught, yes, caught out like that on a programme.

00:44:42.660 I mean, he was put in an audience and he was a psychiatrist and he was asked about schizophrenia and murder.

00:44:49.660 And he said, well, actually, he gave the statistics and so on and said, this is not a huge problem and so on and so forth.

00:44:56.920 And, of course, they'd put him next to a woman whose husband had just been murdered by a skiff friend. 0.95

00:45:03.760 And that, I'm afraid, is...

00:45:05.920 That is not good.

00:45:09.180 Well, that is the technique of our, uh, uh, television shows.

00:45:13.480 Right, well, and I made the comment for those people, but I also want to ask you what you mean by that.

00:45:19.720 Which crime is the big issue, you think?

00:45:24.300 Well, there, there are several, uh, and, and many smaller crimes, of course, are not individually very important,

00:45:31.840 uh, but are, um, uh, cumulatively important, um, and have bad effects.

00:45:41.440 So that, for example, shoplifting, which is not a terribly serious crime, but if it's bad enough,

00:45:48.200 it will drive people out of business and take, uh, close down shops and so on.

00:45:53.260 And you can see it in suburbs of Paris.

00:45:55.480 There are no shops in the suburbs, or some of the suburbs in Paris.

00:45:58.700 Nobody will open a shop there.

00:46:00.160 Uh, and it's not that, well, I mean, there's arson as well, but, um, so you can say that

00:46:08.080 although each individual crime is not terribly serious, uh, cumulatively, it is very serious.

00:46:15.560 Um, but assault is very serious.

00:46:20.140 Uh, yeah, if you don't mind me going a bit off, uh, off the track here.

00:46:26.040 No, go for it.

00:46:26.940 To give you an example of what our police are like.

00:46:30.160 Or what some of our police are like, in the hospital in which I work.

00:46:33.920 First of all, when I started, we had porters, then we got security, uh, uh, security men.

00:46:39.200 And finally, we got a police station on the, in the hospital.

00:46:42.960 And, um, uh, and that they, of course, did nothing.

00:46:48.560 And once, on one occasion, a policeman watched a nurse being assaulted by a drunk, uh, and did nothing.

00:46:56.080 Didn't arrest the person or anything like that.

00:46:58.720 Why not?

00:46:59.840 Well, it's normal.

00:47:01.040 Well, because there's so much paperwork to fill in afterwards.

00:47:04.600 And as one chief constable said to me, you wouldn't want our police to just be filling in paperwork, would you?

00:47:11.480 So, anyway, I mean, he put it in print.

00:47:16.240 So, um, anyhow.

00:47:19.240 Didn't mind doing that paperwork.

00:47:20.520 No.

00:47:21.520 So, anyway, uh, and I wrote to the chief constable saying this has happened.

00:47:27.200 And he wrote back and said, no, no, it doesn't happen.

00:47:30.120 It never happened.

00:47:31.880 That didn't happen.

00:47:33.820 So, anyway, I left it.

00:47:37.320 I, I was pretty disgusted by his answer.

00:47:39.800 But, anyway, uh, he said, we always take all crime seriously, et cetera, et cetera.

00:47:45.260 You know, he's like a politician.

00:47:47.260 And, of course, the chief constables are politicians.

00:47:49.520 They're not policemen anymore.

00:47:50.780 But, anyway, um, about three months later, notices started appearing.

00:47:56.700 All over the hospital saying, from now on, anybody assaulting a member of staff on the hospital premises will be, will be, uh, charged.

00:48:10.080 Okay.

00:48:10.780 Which was an admission that what he said before was a lie.

00:48:15.080 And, secondly, it was rather ambiguous anyway because it rather suggested that assaulting someone other than a member of staff or not on the hospital premises was all right.

00:48:26.700 And they often say, the police often say these things without actually understanding what they're saying.

00:48:34.020 Hey, Francis, do you like books?

00:48:36.360 I only like comics.

00:48:38.420 That's why my favourite publication is The Guardian.

00:48:42.160 It's true.

00:48:42.800 No one does satire and parody like they do.

00:48:45.200 So, did you have a brilliant satirical book for me?

00:48:48.480 Yes, it's a book by one of our fans, Scott Biceno, and it's called Identity Crisis.

00:48:54.040 It has been described as 1984 with jokes.

00:48:57.360 So, it is like The Guardian.

00:48:58.880 No, no, no, mate.

00:48:59.600 It's intentionally funny.

00:49:01.300 Set in present-day northwest London, it tracks the personal journey of cocksure city boy Dave Dalston through a period in which the government has decided to define everyone by their ego profile via a document called the ID card.

00:49:14.320 It's a rollercoaster ride through cancellation, redemption, and spiritual enlightenment.

00:49:21.200 The author has been a fan of trigonometry from the very start, and he has drawn a lot of inspiration from its conversations.

00:49:29.620 So, if you're a fan of trigonometry, then you're going to love this book.

00:49:33.860 Anton, we are getting our 10%, aren't we?

00:49:36.180 Check it out on Amazon, guys.

00:49:37.800 The link is in the description below.

00:49:39.520 So, let me come back to the why question.

00:49:44.300 You said earlier that politicians had been elected to address this issue and were unable to do so due to, quote, forces outside of their control, I think is what you said.

00:49:55.700 Civil service mentality.

00:49:58.460 Don't want to change.

00:50:01.320 They're afraid also, I mean, I think they're afraid of, I think they're afraid of the Guardian, actually, and the commentary.

00:50:12.680 And, you see, you don't get much, you don't get much kudos amongst intellectuals by saying the kind of things I'm saying.

00:50:21.480 No.

00:50:22.340 I mean, I wouldn't advise you to say it at dinner parties.

00:50:24.540 You're operating under the very false assumption that I still get invited to them, which I do not.

00:50:31.780 You know, I've given up attempting to be liked by people that I despise a long time ago.

00:50:36.400 Well, I don't despise them.

00:50:38.600 I just think they're mistaken.

00:50:39.780 Yeah.

00:50:40.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:41.020 And I once had, I mean, the only time I've ever persuaded anybody, actually, was a man called Jonathan Miller, the theatre producer,

00:50:48.420 for whom I had a high regard, who was a very decent and obviously highly intelligent man,

00:50:54.900 and he was a brilliant theatre producer.

00:50:58.780 And, you know, he was, had the standard view of crime, and it's all poverty, and so on and so forth.

00:51:08.460 And I managed to persuade him a bit otherwise, and he just said, well, I don't have the argument against that,

00:51:15.380 and therefore I must accept it.

00:51:16.700 But that is very...

00:51:19.400 Very right.

00:51:19.980 No, when I say I despise, what I mean is there is a group of people that, if you have the wrong opinion,

00:51:26.260 see, they will ostracise you.

00:51:28.480 They believe that you should be pushed out of polite company, society, etc.

00:51:33.040 To me, that is behaviour that is worthy of contempt, personally.

00:51:35.900 But people...

00:51:36.800 Well, I think what has happened, and I can't explain exactly why,

00:51:40.480 I think that the idea of virtue is now almost entirely a matter of opinion.

00:51:47.860 I mean, not in the sense that if you have the correct opinions, you're virtuous.

00:51:53.460 If you don't have the correct opinions, you're a monster, or you're a bad person.

00:51:58.420 Now, I don't take that view, because I think many people with wrong opinions that I consider wrong

00:52:05.680 are very virtuous, good people.

00:52:08.120 Quite.

00:52:10.900 So, actually, opinion is not virtue.

00:52:14.720 So what is virtue?

00:52:15.500 Oh, well, that's difficult, but I think it must involve, to a degree, behavioural.

00:52:27.720 Oh, how old-fashioned.

00:52:29.260 Yeah.

00:52:30.380 What a world.

00:52:31.320 What a world that we live in.

00:52:32.800 And do you think we need to reform the prison service?

00:52:35.780 Do you think it needs radical reformation?

00:52:39.760 I must say that I think things got better in my time.

00:52:44.000 I mean, don't forget I've been retired from it for 15 or 16 years, so I'm talking entirely from memory.

00:52:50.060 And I think, I mean, conditions improved enormously, I'm glad to say, while I was in prison.

00:52:58.200 I would like to, I mean, the thing, I've said that rehabilitation, I don't really believe in rehabilitation,

00:53:04.860 but what I would like to see is more effort at cultural activity in prison.

00:53:14.620 And I am in favour of education, just because I'm in favour of education.

00:53:18.260 And many of these people have had extremely bad educations,

00:53:21.600 and it's one situation in which they might get a good education.

00:53:26.720 But if, it depends what you mean by fundamental reform.

00:53:31.940 As in, do you think enough opportunity is given to prisoners to learn skills,

00:53:37.860 to improve themselves, to come out with a trade?

00:53:41.520 Well, obviously, you can, I mean, I would be happy if it were increased.

00:53:46.720 Yeah, I mean, and I think that is so irrespective.

00:53:50.860 I mean, supposing you made all the efforts in the world to improve it,

00:53:55.300 and you found that actually it didn't decrease the recidivism rate.

00:54:03.980 I would still be in favour of it, because I think it's a kind of ethical thing to do.

00:54:09.980 You ought to make an effort, even if it turns out that your effort isn't entirely successful.

00:54:15.880 But I also believe that prisoners were capable of a lot more than our society demands of them.

00:54:30.000 Not only them, but of huge numbers of people in this country.

00:54:35.960 And you said you didn't believe in rehabilitation, quote, unquote.

00:54:39.260 What do you mean by that?

00:54:40.580 Well, I don't know. What do you mean by rehabilitation?

00:54:42.840 I mean, the first thing is that rehabilitation means that there's something wrong with them in the first place.

00:54:50.340 Well, you could argue there is, isn't there?

00:54:52.160 Like, going round like...

00:54:53.160 They make bad decisions.

00:54:55.060 Is making bad decisions having something wrong with you?

00:54:58.580 I mean, if you're going around...

00:55:00.740 Mate, I've seen some of the decisions you've made.

00:55:02.880 Don't try and argue this one.

00:55:04.400 No, I'll push back on that.

00:55:05.800 I think if you're going around, you know, burgling 50 houses day in, day out, I think there is something wrong with you. 0.94

00:55:14.040 I think if you go around and sexually assault someone, I think there is something wrong with you. 0.97

00:55:18.160 Sexually assaulting is one thing. 1.00

00:55:20.460 And I agree, for example, I met...

00:55:22.800 This is a small number of people, but you do meet people who, from the very earliest age, have done terrible things.

00:55:33.000 So, you know, from the age of three, they put the cat in the washing machine and things like that.

00:55:37.380 And whatever, you know, they do, they steal and lie when there's absolutely no advantage to it to them, and they don't learn, and then they become aggressive, and so on and so forth.

00:55:48.780 And it's very difficult to believe that there isn't something wrong with them in the sense that they've got a slightly different brain from others.

00:55:56.420 And that's been recognised for a long time.

00:55:58.880 You know, it used to be called moral insanity.

00:56:00.520 You know, that they were sane from every possible point of view, but they didn't have any moral sense.

00:56:07.620 And they never learnt any moral sense.

00:56:10.060 So there are those people.

00:56:11.840 But the vast majority, I don't think, have anything wrong with them.

00:56:16.620 And as I said, they do actually stop spontaneously.

00:56:19.800 Most of them.

00:56:20.720 Not all, but most.

00:56:22.380 Well, let me give you a phrasing of rehabilitation that you can then destroy with facts and logic.

00:56:28.160 So, to me, rehabilitation would be to take someone who's in prison for committing a crime, and they come out and lead a quote-unquote normal life.

00:56:38.780 They have a job, they might have relationships, family, whatever, and they never...

00:56:43.160 Well, they eventually do, as I said, they eventually do that spontaneously.

00:56:46.300 Well, their testosterone level drops, and they're no longer trying to make the mark on the world.

00:56:51.680 And I'm, of course...

00:56:53.460 But what I mean is, take a 20-year-old.

00:56:55.180 If you have a long time in...

00:56:58.080 If someone has a long time in prison, it's reasonable to give him assistance to reintegrate into a society which, amongst other things, will have changed since he last saw it.

00:57:11.460 And you can't just chuck him out and say, well, here's 50 quid, now get on with it.

00:57:15.960 But the same is true of drug addicts.

00:57:23.920 I mean, the reason rehabilitation for drug addicts isn't a medical procedure, this is my view.

00:57:30.360 It's that drug addicts have destroyed their lives, they've ruined their relationship with their family, they know only drug addicts, it's very difficult for them to get a job.

00:57:40.320 Because if an employer says, what have you been doing for the last 10 years, if they told him the truth of the drug, the employer wouldn't want him.

00:57:48.280 So, that is a kind of practical assistance that people need.

00:57:54.760 So, they might, for example, need halfway houses and that kind of thing to get back on their feet.

00:58:00.780 Whether you call that rehabilitation, I don't know, would you call that rehabilitation?

00:58:05.060 Part of the process, I would think, yeah.

00:58:06.680 Yeah, well, in that case, I would be in favour of that, yes.

00:58:10.500 Because you can easily see that if you've wasted or ruined 10 years of your life, you don't just pick up the next day and proceed as if nothing has happened in the meantime.

00:58:26.580 And where do you stand on imprisoning drug addicts?

00:58:30.220 People who are heroin addicts, for instance, causing crime after crime after crime purely to feed their addiction.

00:58:36.160 Should we criminalise these people or should we treat it as a helper?

00:58:38.960 Well, here, you see, I disagree with your characterisation of the problem.

00:58:44.480 If you take drug addicts, as I did in the prison, who ended up in prison drug addicts, what you found is that most of them had been convicted often many times before they ever took heroin.

00:58:57.720 So, insofar as there's a relationship between taking heroin and crime, it is that the attraction to crime attracts them to heroin.

00:59:05.560 And if you take heroin addiction, it's not something that just happens to you.

00:59:11.040 It's not like Parkinson's disease and no one really knows where it comes from and it's just one of those terrible things.

00:59:19.380 Heroin addiction is not like that.

00:59:21.300 Heroin addicts, on the whole, the injecting heroin addicts, they go at it for about 18 months before they ever start taking it regularly.

00:59:29.160 They know all about it.

00:59:30.500 To become a heroin addict, you have to know where to get your heroin.

00:59:33.980 You have to know how to prepare it.

00:59:36.700 You have to know how to inject it and where to get the syringes from.

00:59:40.660 Most people find injecting something that they wouldn't really want to do unless they had to.

00:59:47.340 So, in other words, it's not true that heroin hooks them.

00:59:53.300 They hook heroin.

00:59:55.520 So, it is a choice to be a heroin addict.

00:59:58.780 And furthermore, many, many just give up.

01:00:02.420 So, it is not true that they burgle houses just to feed their habit.

01:00:10.460 And actually, heroin addicts, and certainly morphine addicts in the 1920s, were perfectly capable of going out to work just like anybody else.

01:00:20.380 Really?

01:00:21.160 Yeah.

01:00:22.400 So, this idea...

01:00:23.080 If anything, they had a better time of it, I imagine.

01:00:25.540 So, this idea of a junkie committing crime in order to feed his addiction...

01:00:32.100 Shall we say it's very oversimplified.

01:00:34.860 And I remember they used to say, one of them I remember, I should say, not they, but one said, I went out to work.

01:00:41.960 By which he meant, he went out burgling from nine to five.

01:00:45.200 I said, couldn't you do something other than burgle nine to five?

01:00:49.880 Something a little strenuous.

01:00:52.600 And so, I don't think it's a simple matter.

01:01:00.040 It's a simple...

01:01:00.660 And then, but let's say they are addicted, how should we treat that?

01:01:05.080 Is it as a criminal issue, or is it as a medical issue?

01:01:07.980 If they do...

01:01:08.600 Well, I don't think I would treat...

01:01:11.520 I would say taking heroin is criminal, or treated as criminal in itself.

01:01:17.040 But if they commit crimes, then I would say yes.

01:01:19.720 Yeah.

01:01:20.140 Well, I guess what Francis is getting at is what people call the war on drugs.

01:01:24.580 The criminalisation of drug use.

01:01:26.540 Well, I mean, when people say, I mean, I've had this discussion lots and lots of times,

01:01:32.500 they say, well, if we decriminalised, if we made everything available,

01:01:42.360 so you could just go down the shop and buy your crack, then all the crime would disappear.

01:01:46.860 I don't believe that.

01:01:47.600 And I don't believe that needles are going to be beaten into plowshares once we've decriminalised things.

01:01:58.240 I think that we will find something else.

01:02:01.100 And people always say, well, look at Colombia, for example, how violent and so on.

01:02:04.620 Well, people forget that Colombia was extremely violent, in fact more violent,

01:02:09.700 before the existence of cocaine, or the widespread use of cocaine, as was Mexico.

01:02:17.620 So the idea that if we could, if we decriminalised everything,

01:02:24.020 I don't think, is there anybody who suggests we should decriminalise everything?

01:02:27.520 No, but what about something like cannabis?

01:02:29.580 That's where the battle lines are at the moment.

01:02:31.280 Well, that is more discussable.

01:02:34.080 However, of course, it doesn't necessarily mean there'll be less interference from the state.

01:02:39.100 It might eventually be more,

01:02:41.120 because people will have to start being tested for cannabis all the time,

01:02:44.880 and so on and so forth.

01:02:46.000 I mean, there are many situations in which people cannot,

01:02:49.400 even if they're legal, even if it's legalised,

01:02:52.680 should not take cannabis.

01:02:54.000 For example, driving, or you don't want your train driver to be high on cannabis, or your...

01:02:59.900 The service will take a lot longer.

01:03:02.320 Yeah, it would.

01:03:03.460 But we don't test people for alcohol in that way, do we?

01:03:06.440 Yeah, well, we do in a way.

01:03:07.940 I mean, in the sense that we...

01:03:10.660 I mean, most of the time, we're not allowed to be drunk.

01:03:13.000 Actually, that's another thing.

01:03:14.700 We don't enforce the laws against alcohol,

01:03:18.720 being drunk and incapable, or drunk and disorderly.

01:03:21.860 We don't do anything like that,

01:03:23.160 and that's why all foreigners who come to this country are absolutely appalled.

01:03:27.680 I am one such, and I was about to make the joke,

01:03:30.200 that it seems to me just British English culture more than anything,

01:03:33.580 to be drunk and disorderly on a Friday and Saturday night.

01:03:35.880 Yes, well, it's not legal, but nobody enforces the law.

01:03:41.940 And it wasn't...

01:03:43.700 People will say, oh, what about Gin Lane?

01:03:46.000 They always say that, once you start...

01:03:47.740 As if nothing happened between Gin Lane and 1980.

01:03:50.460 And so, anyway, it isn't...

01:03:58.900 I mean, of course, it has become culture,

01:04:01.000 but if it's become culture, it's a very bad culture.

01:04:03.340 And the fact that something is a culture doesn't mean that it's good.

01:04:07.620 Well, coming from a Russian, I think,

01:04:09.600 criticising British drinking culture would be wrong.

01:04:12.080 So let me instead...

01:04:13.320 Yes, I must say, I've seen some fairly unpleasant things in Russian. 1.00

01:04:16.960 Yeah, I'm not sure I could really pull that off.

01:04:19.840 But let me...

01:04:21.100 Final question before we get to our final, final question,

01:04:23.960 penultimate question, therefore.

01:04:26.260 What did you learn from working in prison all this time?

01:04:30.320 I would say that everyone is equal.

01:04:34.100 Well, that's what I learned.

01:04:37.880 For example, to give you an example, I'm not allowed...

01:04:40.680 Are you allowed to swear on this?

01:04:42.060 Of course you are.

01:04:43.380 Absolutely.

01:04:43.700 Absolutely.

01:04:44.480 Okay, okay.

01:04:45.820 Well, prisoners would come in, 0.99

01:04:47.780 so I've got this fucking headache. 0.99

01:04:49.420 So I'd say, well, before we go any further, 0.99

01:04:51.860 what's the difference between a headache and a fucking headache? 0.99

01:04:56.260 And actually, there is a headache that you can get on sexual intercourse, 0.99

01:05:00.780 but that's not what they meant.

01:05:02.160 My girlfriend suffers from it regularly, so thank you.

01:05:08.460 Anyhow, so they'd say, well, that's how I speak.

01:05:11.380 And I'd say, yes, that's what I'm complaining of.

01:05:16.320 That has got to be one of the most surreal conversations

01:05:18.760 in the history of humanity.

01:05:22.000 I can just see you there in your tweed jacket.

01:05:25.400 Carry on.

01:05:27.240 So, I mean, when I said that, they could stop.

01:05:31.500 No one had ever asked them to stop, but they could stop.

01:05:35.840 They discovered it is possible to speak for longer than about three seconds

01:05:40.380 without using that word.

01:05:43.120 Anyway, some would say, well, why shouldn't I?

01:05:47.220 You know, that's the way I speak.

01:05:48.300 And I said, well, supposing I said to you at the end of this consultation, 0.99

01:05:51.680 here's some fucking tablets. 1.00

01:05:56.020 Take two of the fuckers every four fucking hours. 1.00

01:06:00.360 And if they don't fucking work, come the fuck back and I'll give you some other fuckers. 1.00

01:06:06.120 You'd be a bit surprised. 1.00

01:06:08.240 I would say so.

01:06:09.840 I established that I knew how to use the word.

01:06:18.580 So I'd say, we're equal.

01:06:21.120 I don't talk to you like that.

01:06:22.500 You don't talk to me like that.

01:06:23.780 So that's what I learnt, I think.

01:06:28.520 What I'm hearing underpinning all of that, Anthony, is that we pretend way too much

01:06:34.920 about other people's capacity to whatever it is, to behave.

01:06:41.300 We pretend that things, some people just can't do this or we can't not do that

01:06:47.040 or it's the way that we, you know, it's the childhood.

01:06:50.220 And yes, the childhood is important and yes, the education is important.

01:06:52.940 But what I'm hearing underpinning all of that is actually if we call ourselves out

01:06:57.480 and each other out on bad behaviour, sometimes it's just because bad behaviour is easier

01:07:02.060 or we're used to it or whatever it is.

01:07:05.080 Is that what I'm hearing?

01:07:06.060 Is that right?

01:07:06.440 Yeah, I would say that's roughly right.

01:07:08.320 And I believe that that was your experience as a teacher.

01:07:13.400 That is very much so.

01:07:15.660 Part of the reason the school system is no longer fit for purpose is because of bad behaviour.

01:07:22.860 You cannot be taught, you cannot learn in a classroom if there is a disruption every four to five minutes.

01:07:28.960 No learning happens.

01:07:30.000 And we don't want to talk about it because unfortunately in the education system,

01:07:34.280 things have gone so far to the left that it's almost seen as an act of oppression for a teacher.

01:07:40.720 To say stop doing that.

01:07:41.820 Yeah, and to have rules in the classroom.

01:07:43.760 One of my colleagues and one of the best teachers I ever saw was described as right wing

01:07:49.200 because she was a strict teacher. 1.00

01:07:52.200 This is a woman who dedicated her life to teaching in a poor deprived primary school in East London.

01:07:57.800 Yeah, and actually I think, I mean you would know better than I, that children are happier with that.

01:08:06.140 Oh, absolutely.

01:08:06.880 Because you know what?

01:08:07.780 It makes them feel safe.

01:08:09.200 Because when there is strict orders in place, when there is rules, it gives them a structure.

01:08:14.800 And particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable kids, that's what they crave.

01:08:18.080 Because they don't have it at home.

01:08:21.260 There we go.

01:08:22.240 There we go.

01:08:22.900 It seems to me common sense really.

01:08:24.960 It does, but we seem to, and maybe this ties into everything that we're talking about.

01:08:30.940 We are living in a society which is rapidly abandoning common sense.

01:08:35.300 Yeah.

01:08:37.160 Good ending, mate.

01:08:37.980 Look, we had a lovely funny story and then let's just wrap it up on the fact that the world's going down the toilet.

01:08:43.160 That's how I end all my gigs.

01:08:44.980 Brilliant.

01:08:45.540 Yeah, explains the reaction now.

01:08:49.420 Anthony Theodore Dalrymple, thank you so much for coming on.

01:08:52.180 And we've got one final question for you as always, which is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:08:59.140 Well, I think we're talking about the death of common sense and the centralisation of the marginal.

01:09:07.080 So that what you get is a marginal phenomenon taking over our imagination completely.

01:09:15.820 So that, for example, a good example is transsexualism. 0.99

01:09:20.420 What comes next is the interesting question.

01:09:23.380 Oh, hello.

01:09:23.960 Oh, hello.

01:09:24.560 And what do you think is coming next?

01:09:26.580 I think it'll be incest.

01:09:27.760 Incest. 0.68

01:09:30.940 Explain.

01:09:32.220 I think incest will be permissible soon because there's no logical argument against it.

01:09:40.440 I mean, I mean.

01:09:42.340 But then you don't have to have children, right?

01:09:43.940 You don't have to have children.

01:09:46.160 So two consenting adults, quote unquote.

01:09:48.160 Exactly.

01:09:48.820 Go for it.

01:09:50.600 There will be celebrations up and down Cornwall.

01:09:52.660 Mate, you did that joke last time.

01:09:55.860 We got a lot of angry letters.

01:09:57.520 No, I did it against Wales.

01:09:58.840 No, you did Cornwall, the one before that. 1.00

01:10:00.780 You're losing track of your own fucking jokes. 1.00

01:10:02.820 Jesus Christ. 1.00

01:10:04.320 Well, thank you for that.

01:10:05.500 Thank you.

01:10:05.760 I really appreciate it.

01:10:06.820 We've got a couple of questions for locals.

01:10:08.380 I'm sure they're going to be even more problematic than that.

01:10:10.760 But in the meantime, where can people find your work online?

01:10:15.440 Well.

01:10:16.160 Or which books should they buy of yours, particularly given some of the subjects we've been talking about?

01:10:18.940 Well, I would say all of them.

01:10:20.720 You would say that.

01:10:23.700 Well, of course, Amazon you can find.

01:10:25.700 I mean, it's not that I'm keen on Amazon, but it's very convenient.

01:10:31.580 And, you know, various journals.

01:10:34.880 I don't write much in this country anymore.

01:10:37.500 I can see why.

01:10:41.360 Make sure to check Anthony's work under his pseudonym, Theodore Dalrymple.

01:10:46.140 I'm sure you will agree with me.

01:10:47.360 It's been an absolutely incredible interview.

01:10:49.460 And we've got a couple of questions for locals we're going to ask in a second.

01:10:52.240 But in the meantime, thank you so much for watching and listening.

01:10:54.620 We'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a raw show.

01:10:58.520 They always go out at 7pm UK time, 2pm Eastern Standard.

01:11:02.680 And the interviews are also available as a podcast if you like your trigonometry on the go.

01:11:08.080 Take care and see you soon, guys.

01:11:11.020 We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview.

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TRIGGERnometry - January 13, 2022

Theodore Dalrymple - The Truth About Crime

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