For years, many have presumed that socioeconomic status is the primary determinant of criminality in American society. A new study authored by Matt DeLisi, John Paul Wright, and Rafael A. Mangual and published by the Manhattan Institute upends that presumption. The report, titled, “Psychology, Not Circumstances: Understanding Crime as Entitlement,” finds that instead of cracking down on crime by reducing poverty through greater social and capital investments, crime should be tackled by enforcing strict criminal laws, prosecuting criminals, and sending them to prison.
Criminals share similar patterns in their mind-sets, the study’s authors write. “Those mind-sets and expectations . . . reveal entitlement as an important, yet underexplored, driver of a significant amount of criminal behavior.”
The study on the origins of criminality comes amid a surge in crime in the United States. Murder rates spiked 30 percent in 2020 compared with 2019. Fox News found that in the cities of Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., violent crime has increased between five percent and 40 percent in 2022 compared with 2021. This comes on the heels of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police, which sparked a nationwide backlash against law enforcement, likely leading to less proactive policing in high-crime neighborhoods.
The Manhattan Institute study finds that entitlement is key to understanding “antisocial conduct and aggression.” Public policy since the 1960s has encouraged entitlement thinking, according to the study. This can be seen through the lackluster policy responses to drug abuse and homelessness, the popular response to which is a hands-off approach that incentivizes more of the same behavior. Entitlement thinking is also encouraged by progressive prosecutors pursuing criminal-justice reform, declining to prosecute crimes. The authors write, “Suffused with entitlement, progressive reforms take the coddling of offenders to another level. . . . For many, progressive criminal-justice reform is a green light to act out their predations.” George Soros–backed prosecutors have taken the reins of power in jurisdictions across the country, refusing to prosecute certain crimes and expressing their intentions to decrease prison sentences for violent crimes as part of the radical criminal-justice-reform agenda. Over the past decade, Soros’s funding has helped get 75 prosecutors elected across the U.S. who now control half of America’s biggest jurisdictions.
The study addresses what social interventions can be implemented for prevention and rehabilitation: “Those seeking to craft such interventions through public policymaking must reorient their approaches around an understanding of entitlement as one of the single most important ‘root causes’ of crime—one that cannot be treated by financial benevolence from the state.” The study also points out that entitlement is one of the most widely noted criminal thinking tendencies connected to repeat offending, and repeat offenders are a huge factor behind significant crime in the U.S.
According to the researchers, the dismissiveness of the importance of entitlement in crime has led scholars to erroneously believe economic distress is a driving force behind crime, and it has also led to an overestimation of society’s capacity to resolve the “psychological underpinnings of criminal offending.” In the end, keeping criminals off the streets and deterring them with strict laws and incarceration are the most effective ways of protecting law-abiding Americans.
This study proves what commonsense Americans already know to be true. Society is incentivizing criminals to commit more crimes through implementing soft-on-crime policies. This stems from a distorted view that the criminals are somehow the victims of a flawed and unfair system. What has become clear is that the current wave of crime ravaging America’s cities is an issue that disturbs all Americans regardless of politics, and proactive policing combined with serious prosecutors can help thwart the crime wave.