Crime, justice, and law and order. These are words that we continuously hear spewed from the mouths of the right-wing media. Calls to rein in crime, imprison criminals, to deliver justice to those who deserve to be punished. World leaders such as US and Nigeria Presidents nearly all run on a message of being tough on crime. They tell us that individual good people must be prepared to step up and rid society of the criminal menace. Or is this just propaganda to
fuel the for-profit industrial prison complex?

The law creates an arbitrary category of crime. Those things and actions which are criminalized are illegal within the law, mirrored by those which are legal. People often conflate illegality and legality with goodness and evil in their understanding of
the world. However, it is important to note that the state of the law is not related to morality, but to the arbitrary dictates of those who created it. Slavery, for example, was once perfectly legal. Nevertheless, this conflation often determines public response to crime. We deal with criminals as bad people, and our attitudes towards them are shaped by comparing ourselves, law-abiding folk, who we see as good people, to the criminal fringe, who are bad.

For the most part, our response to crime as a
society has been to use authoritarian brute force. We wish to scourge the world of what is seen as evil so we take steps to remove all of the criminals, drug addicts, gang members, etc to make our world a better place. The problem with this mentality is that we must understand that it’s not the people themselves that are inherently bad. There are many factors, other than personal moral
failings which may motivate people to commit crimes.

Multitudes of situations are created in current
society in which an individual may find themselves in a position where they feel forced to do something that they normally wouldn’t do. Economic factors play a substantial role in the crime rate, including job availability, median income, and poverty levels. Additionally, there is also the fact that many illegal things, simply should not be.

Look at the ‘war on drugs’ in the United States, Nigeria, etc where multitudes, usually low-income minority non-violent drug offenders are imprisoned for many years for possession of drugs like cannabis, despite cannabis being widely known to have
beneficial medicinal qualities. In fact, when we examine the history behind why cannabis was made illegal in the US, we find that it was driven by capital gain and utilized racist agendas. But perhaps more on that another time.

Conceptually, crime and morality are often
confused as being intrinsically linked. But even if crime and what is considered morally good were bound at the hip, would this even be desirable? What can be viewed as a negative action by some may not be viewed in the same sense by others. For example, homosexuality can be viewed by some as
bad, and by others as entirely normal. As the saying goes “what is normal to the spider is chaos to the fly.” The concept of morality is not a reliable arbiter of what should be legal or illegal since it is a completely subjective concept based on personal beliefs.

So, if we can’t rely on morality to help us craft a rational criminal legal system, what should we use? Well, we need to develop a joint view of what society is for and what a perfect society looks like. Then we must detail the types of behaviors and actions likely to promote that society’s goals and those likely to be a detriment to them.

Legalize the former and criminalize the latter. So the question of legality becomes less about what is good and evil, and more about what is measurably beneficial and detrimental to a shared vision of society (ahem, a Meritocracy). So something like
murder should be illegal because it harms both the individual and society, but with something like cannabis use, are the overall benefits of its use greater than its detriments? If the data shows a net positive, it should not be illegal.

Once the law has decided you are a criminal, the most common means of dealing with it is by removing an individual entirely from society, locking them up, and throwing away the key. This often doesn’t work, unless you’re the owner of privatized prisons in which case it makes you very rich. Take for example drug users, hundreds of
thousands are held in state and federal prisons in the United States for drug-law violations.

Does locking these drug offenders away from the public do them as individuals any good? Or should we be providing a supportive environment with rehabilitative resources to those that have found
themselves cycling within the suboptimal
circumstance of drug addiction? As the overdose epidemic is on the rise, clearly locking them up is not working.

The inverse of things being illegal, which should not be, are things that are legal and should be banned. For example in a sane and safe society, it would be wise to heavily control guns. Take the Robb Elementary Shooting in Uvalde TeXas, this could not have happened if it was not so easy for the shooter to buy a gun. Sure, removing such easy access to firearms will not take away the
motivations for wanting to commit mass murder, but it is the first step to substantially decreasing active shooter events.

Current society treats crime as the product of
individual moral failings versus societal
shortcomings. To properly address the issue of crime, we must first identify the root of the problem. If there is an increase in crime in any given community we must analyze the situation as a whole, not just the individual criminals. Think of crime as the mythical Hydra, with every head removed from the monster two more would grow in its place.

Every time you lock away a criminal, and fail to fix the circumstances in society which produced that criminal, more will replace them. The socio-economic issues in society are what produce criminality. The best way to fix the problem of theft, for example, is to make sure everybody has enough money and food to live well and happily. What motivation is there to steal in a society without want?

A rational meritocratic society will effectively make crime redundant. It is set up that the basic needs of all citizens are met, while at the same time, the state nurtures its citizens for greatness from the day they are born. This combined with Meritocracy’s rational
approach to law-making will effectively eliminate the vast majority of reasons why crimes occur: arbitrary laws and an unfair malfunctioning economic system.

We are Meritocrats. We will end crime. We will build a fair and just society. We will make a better world. We will Immanentize the Eschaton!