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CUM O ALTO PATROCINIO DE SUA EXCELENCIA O PRESIDENTE DA REPUBLICA
Lisboa,
12-13 March 2001
1.
Introductory remarks
2.
Meanings of Security
3.
Security in the global village: a depressing forecast
4.
The policies of security
5.
From a new insecurity to educational programs on security
1.
Introductory remarks
First of all, I would like to thank the people
who have invited me and have built up this fantastic organisation.
My speech about security is largely connected
with the observations already made by Giovanni Manunta. Giovanni and I have gone
the same way during the years: walking in a parallel direction, unaware of each
other, we arrived at similar conclusion from many points of view. Giovanni and I
are connected in a campaign for the dignity of security and of the people who
work for security.
The radical culture of the Sixties frequently
demonized the police and excused violence. Security is not a fascist or
authoritarian word: it is the first basic
word in human culture. From Horace to Popper, security is a precondition for
the possibility of living a good life in an open society. Security and survival
are strictly connected.
What kind of survival is awaiting us? As regards crime, I will repeat the words said in Great Britain by the Home Secretary Jack Straw. In the homeland of modern human rights, in March 2000 he observed that the number of people in prison in England and Wales had risen in comparison to previous years, and would have continued in this way "for the foreseeable future". Mr Straw revealed that the prison population had increased by 25,000 over the last 10 years to its present level of 65,000. During Labour's term the increase had been 6,000, making the numbers jailed per head of the population the highest in Europe after Portugal.
The average length of prison sentences was rising too, he said, and the
proportion of offenders being sent into custody had increased significantly. He
said: "We are making provision for more prison places. Prison is the answer
for people committing crimes who have not got the message. …If we can divert
people before
they get into prison so much the better, but the forecasts suggest the prison
population is likely to go on rising for the foreseeable future. It is
inevitable that it will rise until the country really has got on top of crime. I
keep saying that as long as we have criminals committing serious crime we have
got to have the prison places for them."
Today we have great problems and great
successes. There are many great achievements in the recent fight against
criminality and insecurity. During the Nineties I have worked in the
Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission and I made studies about organised crime and
white collar criminality on a comparative scale. In the Nineties, from New York
to Sicily, from Korea to Brussels, the desire of legality and justice has
defeated enemies, traditions, complicity; the history of this struggle has been
frequently a success history, but normally unknown or misinterpreted,
under-researched and under-estimated.
2.
Meanings of Security
From a point of view connected with studies of psychiatrists and
neurobiologists, insecurity should be seen as an aspect of the sequence threat-vulnerability-danger-fear-distress
-anxiety-panic-terror, characterised by an increasing intensity of the
sensation of insecurity and by a decreasing level of rational control of the
situation. Insecurity, like fear stems from a rational calculation of the risk,
which is the result of the
calculation of the damage multiplied by its probability.
In
everyday life this calculation is very difficult for theoretic reasons, which
have been illustrated by sociologists like Pareto and epistemologists like
Simon. We often define as fear, conditions of insecurity that are not clear to
us. We present them as if they were concretely defined, over-rationalising,
sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. The calculation produces
insecurity as the result of a complex process in which there is a rational
aspect oriented to consider costs and benefits, but there are also many other
aspects, historical, religious, ideological, cultural, social, even biological
and psychiatric. Put at the centre of the continuum which starts with a threat
and arrives at terror, insecurity can oscillate between a maximum rational
calculation and an absolute lack of rational calculation.
If connected to rational calculation, fear and insecurity can have a widely positive meaning, as in the example of someone driving in heavy traffic, who consequently adopts a more prudent behaviour. In all of our lives we all experience many unpleasant and unforeseen events: survival is connected to the capacity to avoid been suffocated by these events. Rational motivated fear could be considered in a certain sense an instrument of natural selection. The sensation of insecurity is a sentiment of extremely subjective nature which regularly in psychiatric type analysis is closely associated to the interconnection of the organic system and the social system. It cannot be ignored that at the organic level specific neurochemical mechanisms like serotonin, for example, are the basis of such an eminently individual sensation as insecurity; but the activation, the conditioning, and channelling that social institutions and cultural background exercise on individual sensation cannot be ignored either. In other times the dominant sensations of fear were different: the fear of God was characteristic of one period, the fear of communism is characteristic of an other historical period. It is surely with relief and shame that we leave behind us the 20th century, with its nightmares of gulags, lagers, Killing Fields, two world wars of unprecedented ferocity, and so on. The future keeps aside new monsters.
To conclude this argument, I accept the formal definition of security
given by Giovanni Manunta: S
= f (A,P,T) Si. According to this definition, Security is a function of the
interaction of many components, above all the Protector, who performs the
security process, in antagonism to a Threat, in order to protect an Asset from
unacceptable damage, within a specific Situation.
Security is risk-adverse, utility based, defensive, multidimensional.
Differently from safety (related to accidents, hazards, damages), security is
threat-orientated and connected with intelligence, counter-intelligence,
protection, surveillance, vetting and investigation. Safety is one of the most
important goals of security.
3.
Security in the global village: a depressing forecasting
Following
the experts who made the document, in the next fifteen years a greater
international economy and a greater international co-operation could reduce
armed conflict and alleviate the effects of population growth, poverty and water
shortages. But it is also possible that economic growth could divide the world
into haves and have-nots, fuelling "frustrated expectations, inequities,
and heightened communal tensions" while triggering the spread of organised
crime and weapons of mass destruction. From the demographic point of view, the
document says that the world's population will surge from 6.1 billion people
today to 7.2 billion. The growth will be above all in developing nations and in
urban areas. As a consequence of demographic trends and globalization, energy
demands will increase by 50 percent, water shortages could trigger conflict
among States, terrorism will be characterised by the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction among fanatics and rogue States. The threat of a missile attack
involving chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons will increase: "Some
terrorists or insurgents will attempt to use such weapons”. For some countries,
like Russia, the forecasting is devastating: "Besides a crumbling
infrastructure, years of environmental neglect are taking a toll on the
population, a toll made worse by such societal costs of transition as alcoholism,
cardiac diseases, drugs, and a worsening health delivery system".
"The networked global economy will be driven by rapid and largely
unrestricted flows of information, ideas, cultural values, capital, goods and
services, and people," the report observes. "This globalized economy
will be a net contributor to increased political stability in the world in 2015,
although its reach and benefits will not be universal. In contrast to the
Industrial Revolution, the process of globalization is more compressed. Its
evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening
economic divide."
The report paints what is in many ways a problematic portrait of planet
earth in 2015, leaving aside the consequences of this situation on internal
conflicts in democratic societies. It could be not very comfortable: probably we
will have new and severe forms of political instability and political tension.
The reports says: “In developed countries and many of the more advanced
developing countries, the declining ratio of working people to retirees will
strain social services, pensions, and health systems. Governments will seek to
mitigate the problem through such measures as delaying retirement, encouraging
greater participation in the work force by women, and relying on migrant workers.
Dealing effectively with declining dependency ratios is likely to require more
extensive measures than most governments will be prepared to undertake. The
shift towards a greater proportion of older voters will change the political
dynamics in these countries in ways difficult to foresee”. But this caution is
too little.
Crime and corruption pay: available data suggest that current annual
revenues from illicit criminal activities include many hundreds of billions of
dollars. We will have more and more vulnerability, more and more crime, less and
less security. Insecurity will be widespread and motivated by many reasons.
Analysts like Dinesh D'Souza, in his fascinating The Virtue of Prosperity, say correctly that we live in an era of
unprecedented prosperity and that in some countries there is the first mass
affluent class in world history. New technologies have offered many
extraordinary abilities to communicate and share information, and also godlike
power over nature and humanity. But this is only half of the story. Recently the
sociologist Baumann said “the contemporary word is a container full to the
brim of an erratic fear and anxiety looking desperately for an outlet”. In the
eighties, contemporaneously with the Chernobyl disaster, Beck published his book
on Risikogesellschaft, since then he
has become the most known expert on the problem. He underlines the fact that the
theme of risk must not be confused with fear of catastrophies; risk according to
Beck permeates our lives both at the individual and collective level. It is a
common form of stress both for ordinary people and captains of industry, like an
invisible danger that hangs over all of us and could come from anywhere. It is a
historical novelty that cannot be compared with events of the past like the
plague and cholera, because it is connected to a possibility which in these days
is widespread, pervasive, often immaterial and undetermined. In the classical
industrial society the logic of production dominates the logic of risk while
today the production of risk dominates industrial production: the creation of
riches is methodically accompanied by the social production of risk, which
regards both “irreversible threat to the life of plants, animals and men and
global threat impossible to circumscribe”.
Speaking about anxiety in alimentary matters, from mad cow to
species-jumping contagion, genetically modified crops and biological cloning, it
has been said: “The new political battlegrounds of Europe will be the
slaughterhouse and the supermarket. Food safety, not tax cuts and missile
defences, will make and break political careers there...President Jacques Chirac
and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin recently opened their duel for next year's
French presidential election with important and thoughtful speeches on food
safety. In his Feb. 8 speech in Lyon, Mr. Chirac urged all nations to make the
ethics and safety of biotechnology and agriculture a topic for diplomacy and
treaties”.
In
this perspective modernity becomes above all uncertainty and estrangement: we
are all estrangers in the sense that we feel a radical distance from the others
and we ask ourselves what to do with liberty in a world that fills us with fear:
“the abuse of liberty is the most reliable indicator of its presence. Whoever
wishes to know how free are the citizens of any given country…should observe
how men and women behave with respect to the excesses of liberty: pornography,
juvenile delinquency, criminality of foreigners - : if they react with
tranquillity, liberty is in good hands” (Beck).
In the years of the profound economic crisis of American society,
president Roosevelt solemnly declared that freedom from fear is one of the
fundamental aims of a democratic society.
4.
The policies of security
Our rationality is performed within an institutional
context. Individuals do a cost-benefit analysis of reward/punishment before
breaking the law. Institutions have a decisive role: they can prevent crime (like
youth centers and interventions in the labor market) or discourage crime (like
fair investigations and correct imprisonment). Quantity and quality of crime is
a measure of the functioning of the institutional framework in every society.
The standard theory that people who commit
crimes are a social product is not wrong, but is compatible with the solutions
offered up by the "rational criminal school”. Both education and
punishment are very important in order to avoid crime. Rational criminal
theorists argue correctly that crime will be reduced when it doesn't pay and
institutional criminal theorists argue correctly that crime will be reduced when
it will be cured by social interventions .
In
this quotation I show the typical line of reasoning of rational criminal theory.
Afterwards I will show the typical line of reasoning of the new paradigm in
social intervention. I quote: <<Laws inhibiting individual action against
malefactors reduce the costs of lawlessness. When landlords cannot evict
unsavory tenants, when property owners cannot oust suspicious trespassers, and
when teachers cannot eject rowdy students from class, crime rates will increase.
…If the risks of crime fall, then crime increases. And vice-versa. It's that
simple. There's no need to send all those "sick" people out there who
are perpetrating rapes and robberies to a psychiatrist's couch. Increase the
odds that they'll go to prison or get shot, and they'll cure themselves. In one study of major
felonies, the rate of robberies decreased by about 1.3 per cent in response to
each 1 percent increase in the probability of punishment. In a study of crime
rates in England, the fall in imprisonment rates between 1954-1967 was found to
have contributed to a 44 percent increase in aggregate crime. These studies also
explain why overly harsh mandatory sentences often have no deterrence effect.
Life in prison means little if would-be criminals believe that their chances of
conviction are slim. Our legislators, although they often posture about being
tough on crime, too often miss the point of "rational criminal" theory.
Example: Because so much prison space has been squandered on lengthy
mandatory minimums for drug offenders, burglars rarely go to prison. Then
legislators wonder why burglary is increasing.
Meanwhile, politicians like Chicago Mayor Richard
Daley and Gov. Parris Glendening of Maryland attack the very principle of
self-defense — while enjoying the protection of well-armed government
bodyguards. They display little patience for the theory that people who live in
rough neighborhoods should have just as much right as politicians to defend
their lives.
But
making it harder for law-abiding citizens to possess and carry guns only means
that rational criminals will face a smaller risk of armed resistance. Chances
are the politicians will then blame the NRA for the surge in "random
violence”. What are the two most ridiculous words in modern political lingo?
"Random violence." Calling violence "random" implies that
crime is just a "random" event, like hail or falling rocks. During the
Los Angeles riots, truck driver Reginald Denny, by this theory, just had the
misfortune to happen into some random violence emitting from sociologically
deprived victims — just as if he had taken a wrong turn into a sandstorm.>>.
In
rational criminal theory the typical line of reasoning sometimes misinterprets and under-estimates the importance of
social and institutional intervention. It is not odd, because all the
traditional means of social and institutional intervention are born in a very
different historical period and must be updated to a new historical period. To
put it in an other way, they must be adapted for a new millennium: all the
traditional means of intervention change nature and relevance. From the
agricultural and industrial societies of the past we are now in the global
village: a society characterised by
abundance of possibilities and abundance of information, indiscretion, rumours,
clues, suspicions, temptations, and
dangers. The great information revolution has deeply altered all aspects of
police, prosecution, and court room dynamics, including forensics evidence, plea
bargaining and the uprightness of the trial-by-jury system. The director
of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University in Chicago said
that in the US, about 90 people have been cleared of crimes that put them on death row,
and many others have been released in noncapital cases,.
From Durkheim to McLuhan, there is a very intricate way for the
exploration of this new brave world: the debate over ever-more sophisticated
ways of snooping on the public at home, at work, and at play is on the desks of
lawyers and lawmakers, who debate about surveillance technologies such as those
used for workplace monitoring, locational tracking, video surveillance, and
electronic profiling. Private industry uses of biometrics include scans of the
iris for personal identification and a plan to use fingerprint sensor technology
as a security lock.
Even
liberty and emancipation have created new
problems in quantity and quality, for instance in fields such as juvenile
justice and female criminality. At the beginning of the
Sixties, in the U.S. the ratio of women offenders to males was 1:5, and had
grown to 1:3 already during the Seventies. In Italy at the beginning of the
Nineties we speak daily about <<baby killers>> and <<baby
bosses>>. Even more wives, girlfriends, sons of Mafia members are involved
in crime activities. In Great Britain a record number of women are jailed for
burglary and drugs offences. In 1991 the female prisonjail population rose to
record levels of 3,105 double the figure of five years ago. Linda Jones, the
head of women's policy at the Prison Service, said in June 1999 the figures
"scotched the myth" that women were being jailed for non-payment of
fines and for debts such as television licences. A third of inmates were serving
terms for drug offences and another third had been involved in "drug-related"
incidents.
The trend is global: new forms of crime and deviance are increasing all
over the world. While old forms of criminality have not disappeared: the German
government observed in February 2001 that “crimes by extreme rightists in
Germany, including anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner attacks, jumped by 59 percent
last year, confirming a trend that is worrying many politicians and Jewish
leaders. Anti-Semitic crimes surged by 69 percent to 1,378, while crimes aimed
against foreigners rose 57 percent to 3,594, the Interior Ministry said.
Especially worrying was a jump in violent crimes to 998, a third more than in
1999, the report said. When crimes such as displaying neo-Nazi symbols or
distributing propaganda were included, the total was 15,951, an increase of 59
percent over the previous year”.
5.
From a new insecurity to educational programs on security
Today there is growing incapacity to
put order in traditional methods of channelling our perception of insecurity. On
a general level, which individually is declined in a variety of ways, as human
beings we are permanently characterised by an excess of perception and today
moreover we are inundated by a flood of stimuli as never before in history. In
this situation insecurity grows and the possibilities of rationalising diminishe;
many fears socially very widespread are the fruit of this interpretative
breakdown: they are precarious and hurried rationalisations, which frequently
are resolved in the individuation of a scapegoat. Contemporary societies are
characterised by an inferior capacity to regulate sensations of insecurity. This
historical novelty favours regression and the re-emergence of irrational
tendencies.
It has been said that after the traumatic change from agricultural
society to industrial society we are in the middle of another traumatic change,
connected with the coming of a form of society
profoundly typified by global information technology: the Third Wave after the
First Wave of the agricultural revolution of ten thousand years ago which
determined the great transformation of society and the Second Wave, the
industrial one of few centuries ago. In Future
Shock Alvin Toffler insisted very much on the impact of acceleration, but
successively has underlined the growing importance of the theme of security.
This new civilisation is characterised by turbo-capitalism, a metaphor which
gives the idea of a capitalism that develops at high speed and therefore runs
the risk of one those terrible accidents which are frequently connected with
high speed. Our world would be like an airplane on automatic pilot in continuous
acceleration, but without a specific destination. According to the not very
reassuring theories of Bzrezinski (in Out of Control), turbo-capitalism as well as speed and globalisation
is also characterised by destabilisation of social classes and exacerbation of
the economic differences; therefore the principal sensations of insecurity
change, frequently well motivated and frequently substantially obscure, as
regards both controversial scientific aspects and qualitative and quantitative
effects socially.
Relevant studies show that there are in the Unites States 28 million
crime victims, who face a greater chance of increased drug or alcohol use,
anxiety, depression and suicide. Victims often suffer decreased productivity at
work or lowered performance in school. Moreover, it is well known that one of
the best predictors of whether a person will commit a crime is whether he or she
has been a victim. In February 2001, officials said that the Prime Minister of
Great Britain Tony Blair had been "shocked" by research showing that
“more than a third of the 100,000 people responsible for most serious crime
had been in care as children. Government figures show that half of them were
under 21, two-thirds were drug addicts, half had no qualifications and
three-quarters were unemployed”.
After many years spent rehabilitating offenders and providing social-service help, we should be rehabilitating victims an offering them a greater range of support: for years we have seen more women and young people in prison than ever before, and this was interpreted as the consequence not the cure. Victims' rights advocates are seeking a different regulation: the presence of victims in the process, restitution orders--in which criminals are ordered to repay their victims. Criminals should have duties, and also victims should have rights.
After the dominant idea of the Sixties that we have basic human rights,
we need to underline the idea that we have basic human duties. Some forms of
cultural tendencies are boosting the point. For instance communitarianism, which
seeks to balance individual rights with social responsibilities, individuality
with community, and individual rights with the common security. From Sixty Eight
the rights to liberty and privacy have been overemphasised to the detriment of
the rights to security. I’m not saying that it's time
to swing the pendulum back to overemphasization of security, but in any
case it’s time to find a more reasonable position between the two extremes.
In Great Britain, the Home Secretary Jack Straw has observed: "The
Police have a responsibility for the levels of crime but in fact we all have a
responsibility to make our area safe and do something about it. This shows the
solution lies as much in the hands of local councils and communities as it does
in the hands of the police."
Citizens have rights and duties. In order to
prevent crime, a sentiment of responsibility must be impressed within our souls
and bones. The Prime Minister of Great Britain Tony Blair has brilliantly
underlined that responsibilities matter. President George W. Bush has shown
himself very interested in a “compassionate” public intervention in social
matters, as it has been underlined favorably also by leftist thinkers like Bob
Putnam.
At the beginning of 2001, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll revealed that 60
percent of Americans say the public-school system is doing a poor or "only
fair" job of educating young people, and 54 percent of parents say they
would prefer to send their child to a private school. 40 to 50 percent of
congressmen send their children to private schools, and large part of
public-school teachers do the same. Someone observes: “Would you eat in a
restaurant in which the restaurant's owner refused to eat? The people who know
the system best do not want to be part of it”. Bush's legislation or voucher
provisions would change a situation where 95 percent of education funds are
spent at the State and local level. Instead, the new ideas of compassionate
conservatism want return education dollars, education choice, and education
power back to parents: “President Bush has the right idea: Accountability in
education has been absent far too long. But a tiny, federal voucher program can
do little to bring real accountability to a system that desperately needs it.
The real merit of the Bush plan isn't the plan itself, but that it has launched
a national debate about parental control in education”.
Government could be a big part of the problem or a big part of the
solution. For instance, we are told that welfare is needed to reduce poverty,
yet as Charles Murray proved in Losing
Ground, success against poverty was reversed in the US at precisely the
moment the government declared "war" on it and greatly increased
welfare expenditures. At least after the pages of Schumpeter, we know that
political entrepreneurs love to create forms of public expenditure. For instance,
thousands of "off-budget enterprises," as it has been said correctly.
In the USA as elsewhere, at the State and local levels of government, many
politicians have so rigged elections that a great percentage of all incumbents
are re-elected. Frequently public money creates incumbents, constituents, bribes,
contributions, corruption, and so on. This framework is true also for public
security, where there are vested interests, largely worried more about their own
survival than in the survival of the citizens.
When, instead of favouring free markets and contracting for
confidentiality, the government prefers a one-size-fits-all approach to things,
it will be a big part of the problem. If we change the words government and
State with the word community, maybe our conceptual framework will change. State
and government are distant entities, community is even more abstract, but it
seems a familiar entity. If an
individual's pre-eminent place in community is recognised, his natural rights
and his social duties are up to the task of distinguishing legitimate from
illegitimate public intervention. Modern government is much too large for any
average citizen, who has little incentive to become informed about bureaucratic
activities, for he spends most of his time earning a living, raising his family,
etc. But the area of education is the area where the average citizen can
understand immediately what the community can do for him.
I’m
trying to offer an example about the educational intervention in the very
delicate matter of drugs. The American federal government annually announces
that it is winning the war on drugs, but this is hardly credible.
Here the rapport between the State and common security lies in a tangle.
While the federal government continues to soldier on with its 30-year war
on drugs, the American citizens have become increasingly sceptic. Popular
support for the anti-drug war has eroded during the years, and opinion polls
show that a growing number of American citizens believe the military
intervention has been ineffective. Significantly, some American States have
begun to consider the possibility of decriminalizing drug offences, even in
conflict with federal drug control policies.
When California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition
36 (“which weeds out drug abusers from the courts and jails, and forwards
them into less-expensive treatment programs”), we had the best example of the
transition of ordinary people to a research of new public means of interventions
in the field.
“Americans
are tired of wasting billions of dollars on a drug war that is not working,
especially when clear pragmatic alternatives exist," said Ethan Nadelmann,
the U.S. Customs Service chief. Commissioner Ray Kelly said national policies
that rely instead on interdiction and incarceration as a means to stem the flow
of drugs into this country or punish those involved in the buying and selling of
narcotics have not worked enough. "I don't know of any thinking person in
law enforcement who doesn't say we need more prevention and treatment,"
Kelly said. Prevention and treatment are the same words used many times by other
specialists in different criminal matters. In his Mindhunter,
when asked about what to do with serial killers, the best known expert on serial
killers says: we arrive too late, the great thing to do can be made a long time
before, in the family, in the school, and so on. All the classical culture from
the Bible to Confucius, from John Locke to John Dewey insists on education.
Prevention and treatment have today a new meaning, founded on an education
adjusted to the tasks of the third millennium.
Technology and affluence cannot solve the basic human problem of an
over-exposition to stimuli and of an excess of possibilities. The risk of a loss
of points of reference and of interpretative codes increases sensations of
insecurity. Contemporary societies favour the re-emergence of irrational
tendencies connected to the most classical human questions: What is the meaning
and value of life? What are the reasons of survival? What must I do for my
country? Educational programs must offer the basic answers of today for the most
classical human questions.
In
the CIA report previously quoted, Global
Trends 2015: A Dialogue about the Future with Nongovernmental Experts, the r
ole of education is clearly emphasised : “Education will be
determinative of success in 2015 at both the individual and country levels. The
globalizing economy and technological change inevitably place an increasing
premium on a more highly skilled labor force. Adult literacy and school
enrollments will increase in almost all countries. The educational gender gap
will narrow and probably will disappear in East and Southeast Asia and Latin
America. …Progress will vary among regions, countries, and social groups,
triggering increased income inequalities within as well as among countries. …School
enrollments will decline in the most highly impoverished countries, in those
affected by serious internal conflicts, and in those with high rates of
infectious diseases”.
The forecasting is focused on international affairs and maintains an
optimistic inclination about internal politics in developed countries. The dire
reality is that, above all in developed countries, those
who want to cope with social ills or rehabilitate people liable for crime must
start from the moral dimension of crime.
Radical critics say
that schools have to brainwashed generations of children into becoming docile
supporters of the status quo. Governments at all levels would have devote
enormous energy and resources to manufacturing
the will of the people. This kind of State, the
great nineteen century State, vanished and sank in the abysses of
the cold war. Now, after the end of the cold war, and in an era of new
world disorder, the traditional State contracts and numbs. Our minds are not so
much manufactured as confused, and security is largely our individual business,
as citizens, as consumers, as entrepreneurs, as mammy and daddy, and so on.
Individual citizens interested in protecting their lives and property are
society's first line of defence against criminals: security is their business.
Education must catch the point. For instance, if we believe that exposure
to TV and movies suggestion is connected to several random acts of teenage
murder and rage, we must engage ourselves as citizens and as parents in the
problem. And what a problem!
In the USA many if not most of approximately 14,000 school districts have some kind of zero tolerance rules, which address drugs, sexual harassment, weapons and violence. Most of the schools set out automatic punishments for various offences that range from reprimands to suspensions to criminal prosecution. Many observe that “Instead of dealing with the root issues that are destroying the moral fabric of our nation, schools have implemented zero tolerance in order to project an image of responsibility… Zero tolerance policies in schools can be unfair, some lawyers argue, because a student found with aspirin in his pocket can get suspended as quickly as one with cocaine or marijuana”.
For someone, security means buying door locks and firearms, to raise the
costs of crime by increasing the number and potency of obstacles which the
criminal must confront. In his interesting More
Guns, Less Crime, John Lott explains that where more citizens carry guns for
lawful protection, there the rates of violent crime are less relevant (examples
given by this school of thought go from Switzerland to a comparison between
different areas in the USA). He says that when State laws force guns to be
locked up, crime rises “So, if the personal costs of a life of crime climb
high enough, it stands to reason that some criminals will be on the lookout for
other lines of work”. After having examined crime
data spanning decades in all 3,200-plus counties in the United States, Lott
concludes that the most important factor in the deterrence of violent crimes
were increased police presence and longer jail sentences. In contrast to
near-complete bans in Australia and Great Britain, many U.S. States have laws
that allow private citizens to carry a loaded gun at all times in most public
places.
With a criminal justice system keeping over 2 million Americans locked
up, and with more State and federal prisoners added to US prisons during the
Clinton presidency than during any prior US president (and more federal inmates
added under Clinton than under Bush and Reagan combined), it is obvious to say
that what will be decided in the US during the next years (about prisons, guns,
decriminalisation, immigration, environment, and so on), will be crucial for
many other social contexts.
Last, but
not least, I would introduce some conclusive remarks about the necessity to
teach legality at all levels. We must teach security, from protection of assets
to the avoidance of dangerous situations, but even more we must teach legality.
From this point of view the Italian case is very interesting: we Italians have
so high a level of discussion about the border between legal and illegal, that
we have promoted many courses on legality in the schools and the universities.
This
is a specific problem of our historical heritage, characterised by the big
presence of great political forces (above all the Catholics, the communists, the
fascists), who were not nurtured in a culture of legality. They had their idea
of legality, rooted in the past, in the future, in the Sky, but not in legal,
formal, constitutional procedures.
Even
our police and security services were not prepared to cope with the new problems
of our time. For decades they were above all directed against the red scare,
which during fifty years dominated a country where the Communist Party was the
biggest Communist party in Europe. For years the central themes in security have
been very different from what they are now. It is not strange: like in Great
Britain, or in the Us, we have a complex reality to face.
In
a fascinating book, Robert Putnam said that “Palermo could be the future of
Moscow”, and he was right. In order to avoid that many cities and countries go
the same way as Palermo and Moscow, it is important to give lessons, examples,
models, reasons and courses on legality (not only in ex-communist States). The
great nineteenth century State was a powerful, but distant father: we now need
compassionate communities (that is, governmental, State, local, public and
private organisations) fully engaged in the necessity to speak at length to our
children, politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and lawmakers about both security
and legality. Security, legality, and morality are words that have been
connected since the beginning of human culture and must be tightly connected in
everyday experience of responsible communities.