Evolving Crime

Crime evolves, like a living thing. It adapts, and changes in order to survive, and propagate. Modern crime would not survive in the past any more than a modern human could survive with the dinosaurs. Neither could past criminal behavior survive in our modern world. Imagine a cattle rustler attempting to rustle a herd today. He'd never get past the first fence.

And so crime evolves. Someone like Jack the Ripper would never have gotten past their first victim in today's world, not with even the most basic forensic techniques. Even Ted Bundy would not have gotten very far before he was made just another anonymous crime statistic rotting in a prison cell somewhere.

But rotting criminals don't solve the problem of crime. It only forces criminals to evolve. As laws get tougher, and detection gets more sophisticated, so do criminals. If criminals didn't evolve there'd be almost no crime at all these days. The so-called war on crime follows the pattern of escalation that precedes war, not the destructive chaos that defines war. Real wars only come AFTER the escalation (and is unfortunately all we have to look forward to if we allow the escalation to continue).

Soon, criminals will be compelled (by "tough on crime" laws) to commit crimes so heinous and sophisticated that what i did will look almost innocent (I raped and killed four children, and killed three other people, an entire family, that I perceived as, "in my way"). Soon men will attack adults with children right out in the open in order to fulfill fantasies that are shaped by the very social mechanisms purported to stop such crimes. Attacking the means of crime while ignoring the motivation only compells the criminal to find some other means. Where there is a will there is always a way.