Compare & contrast
- Thread starter Diogenes
- Start date
1% of the population accounts for most violent crime.
In the centuries when England and much of Northwestern Europe were becoming the places that later defined the West’s peak, courts and the gallows removed on the order of 1% of each male generation—horse thieves, robbers, murderers, and repeat predators.
Petty theft was not always capital. The rest often was, and enough of those sentences were carried out that the most violent men did not keep reproducing or operating at scale.
Homicide rates fell from medieval highs to a fraction of what they had been. Armed robbery and similar predation became rarer. Civilization could spend its surplus on production, science, and order instead of endlessly managing a predatory underclass.
We reversed the policy. We still have the same 1%. We subsidize them, cycle them, and call the result compassion.