7 Crime
Stephen J. Machin
If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of intelligence is
its father.— Jean de la Bruyère (1688)Crime is a problem, both for the criminal and for the com-
munity.^1 For the criminal it can lead to social exclusion and
a life that fails to satisfy. For the community it reduces the
quality of life.
These are the effects of crime. But in this chapter we re-
verse our usual order and look first at its causes— why in
our society some people commit crimes while others don’t.
Who Commits Crime?
By the age of 10 we can already predict to some extent who
will commit crime later in life.^2 It is those who have behav-
ioral problems in early life, and to a lesser extent those who
underperform academically. As we shall show, the pattern is
almost identical in Britain and the United States.
Britain
For Britain the evidence comes from the British Cohort
Study. From it we can find for each individual whether they