ANATOMY OF A CRIMINAL

Guy Ritchie is articulate and thoughtful, his sport coat and sweater the
natural choice of a soft-spoken professor. No one would think this slight,
middle-aged man is a convicted second-degree murderer. Three years have
passed since his release after 22 years in prison. He lives in Ottawa in
the quasi-freedom of parole, required to report to officials who will
forever monitor where he goes and what he does. "I'm a lifer," he shrugs.

In 1981, he was 21 years old and a bit of a punk. Like so many young men,
he was a petty troublemaker, convicted once for a minor assault. That
changed one day in September. "My situation started as a push," he says,
clearly uneasy, but direct nonetheless. "It escalated into a fight for my
life, and the victim's life, within seconds.

"I initiated the violence, I pushed the man. That's as far as I was
planning to go. However, the man absolutely lost it. He thought he was in a
fight so he started defending himself." Mr. Ritchie had a knife. The man he
shoved had one, too. "Next thing I know, I'm defending myself, and it
escalated within seconds."

Had Mr. Ritchie considered that his shove could end in murder, he might
have considered the automatic life sentence, with parole only possible
after 10 to 25 years (depending on the charge level and a judge's
decision). But "there was no thought process," he says quietly. "There was
absolutely nothing like that. There was fear."

Mr. Ritchie's experience is a lesson for those who want more
"tough-on-crime" measures in Canada. That movement is founded on the idea
that increasing punishment -- putting more people in prison for longer --
effectively reduces crime.

Obviously, a criminal locked in prison can't commit more crimes and, as any
parent knows, punishing bad behaviour discourages it. To most people, it's
just common sense. But according to most criminologists, it's wrong.

Experts don't doubt that a functioning criminal justice system deters crime
- -- the looting that breaks out during police strikes is proof enough. But
the more important question is whether Parliament can further cut crime by
imprisoning more offenders for longer. Tony Doob, a criminologist at the
University of Toronto, says his colleagues are close to unanimous: "I think
almost everybody would say no."

Recent American experience has only widened the gap between what the public
and the criminologists think. In the U.S., soaring prison populations have
been matched since 1992 by plummeting crime, but a careful look at the
evidence suggests that the spectacular increase in the American
incarceration rate has had only a modest effect on crime rates.

It doesn't seem to make sense and to understand why it doesn't, we have to
look at the complicated realities of crime. We have to understand, for
example, that Guy Ritchie's crime -- violent, impulsive, thoughtless -- is
far more common than the sort of coolly calculated murders in Agatha
Christie novels. That reality may not make great novels, but understanding
it can make for more rational crime policies and safer streets and homes.

The argument for incapacitation -- locking up the criminals -- may seem
simple: The more criminals are locked away for longer periods, the less crime.

But only a small fraction of all offenders are ever convicted and
sentenced. In Canada in 1999, 2.6 million offences were reported to police,
resulting in 300,000 convictions in adult courts. Of these, only 3.7 per
cent were punished with prison or jail time. Even if every conviction, no
matter how minor, were punished with jail or prison, it would still account
for only 11.5 per cent of the total number of reported offences.

And the majority of crimes never come to the attention of police. So the
total number of offenders who are actually caught, convicted and sentenced
is even smaller. "It's about two to three per cent of them," says Julian
Roberts, a criminologist at the University of Ottawa. Mr. Roberts likens
crime to a disease: "Now, if only three per cent of the people with the
disease go to the hospital, the treatment could be 100-per-cent effective,
but the overall rate of that disease in the population is not going to go
down very much. Same thing for the criminal justice system. If you're only
punishing three per cent of offenders, you could put them all away for 25
years and they won't re-offend. But that's such a small piece of the puzzle."

Of course, not all criminals are created equal. Research indicates that a
very large portion of all crime is committed by a very small number of
criminals. By one estimate, five to seven per cent of offenders are
responsible for half of all arrests. Obviously, if you put those criminals
in prison, it will have a bigger effect on crime rates.

But the idea of identifying and locking up "career criminals" has been
studied for years and discarded. Ethically, it raises the spectre of
imprisoning people not for crimes they commit, but for crimes we think they
will commit. As well, while criminologists can describe the general
characteristics of high-rate offenders, there is no reliable way of
predicting whether particular individuals will commit crimes at a high rate
in the future. Officials can only base their decision on criminal records,
which are a lousy way to predict crimes because rap sheets take time to
accumulate.

In fact, time itself is the greatest crime-fighter: The rate at which
people commit crimes drops off dramatically by the time they hit their
early to mid-20s; by one estimate, the average criminal career of someone
who has committed a violent crime is 10 years. That means, as criminologist
Daniel Nagin has written, "while a long criminal record may be a good
signal of very active prior offending, it may also be a signal, due to age,
of an individual having entered a period of offending rate decline."

For this reason, virtually all criminologists, including James Q. Wilson, a
political scientist who defends tough sentencing, think
"three-strikes-and-you're-out" laws are a mistake. By the time the third
strike sends the offender to prison for life, he is very likely past the
peak of his criminal career. The average age of a person given a life
sentence under California's three-strikes law is 36, a decade older than
peak offending years.

"Three-strikes laws," says Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie
Mellon University, "are a prime example of inducing wastefulness in the
incarceration process by keeping people in prison well after their criminal
careers have finished." The same is true of all severe mandatory-minimum
sentences.

Besides, habitual criminals single themselves out. In research in the early
1980s, Mr. Blumstein showed that "just by chance alone the prisons will be
overly occupied by people who are (high-rate offenders) because they roll
the dice more often." High-rate criminals will eventually be caught and
punished with longer sentences because of past convictions. So the justice
system tends to lock up the worst offenders just in its ordinary operation.

That has a crucial implication. "As you increase the proportion of
convicted offenders who go to prison instead of being put on probation,"
writes Mr. Wilson, who is often cited in conservative circles, "you dip
deeper into the bucket of persons eligible for prison, dredging up
offenders with shorter and shorter criminal records." In other words,
locking up more criminals in prison means putting away increasingly
less-serious offenders. And as that happens, the crime-control benefit from
locking up new prisoners drops.

This is why criminals are so often drug abusers. The sort of person who
indulges in drugs without concern for the health risks is one who might
indulge in crime without concern for the risk of punishment. And drug use
can further cut the chances of criminals thinking rationally. "Even if you
had calculating offenders," said Julian Roberts, "they're not sober
calculating offenders. In so many cases, they are addicted, or they're a
non-addicted abuser, or just a heavy social drinker."

Much the same reasoning helps explain why crime is strongly linked to age.
Teenagers are, by definition, immature and teenagers commit a lot of
crimes. In every society, criminal behaviour peaks in the early 20s and
falls off rapidly -- so regularly, in fact, it's sometimes called "aging out."

Teenagers are notorious for acting without considering the consequences of
their actions. As they age, their brains mature and they better understand
risks and consequences. But until that happens, teenagers are particularly
unlikely to calculate costs and benefits before they act.

Of course, for tough punishment to be a deterrent, people first have to
know what the punishments are. But they don't. Research shows that even the
public at large is not very knowledgeable of the punishments for crimes.
Criminals are even less so. On average, they are socially marginalized
people -- not the sort to read newspapers and follow public policy debates.
They are also, on average, less intelligent and less well-educated. In
Canada, 63 per cent test at or below the Grade Eight level in mathematics
and literacy. In Avenal State Prison, a standard, lower-security
institution in California, the majority have less than a Grade Four
literacy level.

At the time he committed his crime, Dorsey Nunn had a sixth-grade
education. The legal system was simply beyond him, he says. "Sentencing is
a very complicated thing in the state of California and a very complicated
thing nationally. If you ask the average person who's committed a crime
what they will receive, how in the hell are you supposed to know when it
takes a judge and two or three lawyers to figure that s--t out?"

A small group of criminals do have better awareness. "The multiple
recidivists will have some idea," says Mr. Roberts, "just because they've
been through the system on several occasions." But the serious offenders
Mr. Roberts has in mind are almost certainly in the core of high-rate
offenders, those most likely to pursue crime no matter what. So the
criminals most likely to know about punishments are those least likely to
be deterred by them.

All these other factors aside, however, what matters most is violent crime.
It is violence that appalls and frightens the public and fuels support for
tough-on-crime policies. it is also violent crime, unfortunately, that is
least affected by tougher punishments.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's classic novel of murder and guilt,
Raskolnikov ponders his crime for weeks before he does the deed. That is
rarely the reality; violence is usually impulsive.

Tony Doob recalls speaking with a woman held in a young offender facility.
She had beaten up her best friend. "So I gave her the deterrence question:
'When you were beating up your best friend, did you ever think you would
end up here?' And she looked at me like I was crazy. And she said, 'When I
was beating her up, I was thinking I wanted to beat the s--t out of her
because of what she'd just said about my boyfriend. I wasn't thinking about
this.' ... The notion that she would be deterred by 12 months instead of
six months, she wasn't thinking that at all. She was out of control."

Abu Qadir Al-Amin has experienced that moment. Today, the 51-year-old is
director of the Supportive Living Program, a San Francisco group that helps
parolees return to life in the community. But in 1969, he was a teenager
with a drug habit and a gun. "I was under the influence of multiple drugs.
Heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, barbiturates, alcohol. Cough syrup. So I was
kind of out of my head." While Mr. Al-Amin was carrying out a petty theft,
"a security guard grabbed me and he felt the gun on my waist and went for
his gun. So a struggle ensued and unfortunately I won the struggle. He was
trying to get his gun out. I reacted and shot him." On May 4, 1970, Mr.
Al-Amin was sentenced to death. After two years and four months on death
row, his sentence was commuted to life and he was later released on parole.

There was never any calculation, he says quietly. Not even the possibility
of the death penalty entered his mind. "I wasn't thinking at all, I just
reacted to the situation."

None of this denies the offender's responsibility. No emotion justifies
violence. Passions can be restrained. But they aren't restrained by a cool
calculation of benefits versus costs. People just don't think that way.

In a sensational case last year, a California man who grabbed a dog and
hurled it into traffic was sentenced to three years in prison by a judge
who described the crime as "a case of rage-induced violence." The judge
gave the offender the maximum punishment because, he said, "I believe that
prison can send a message and it can deter." But if the offender is truly
in a "rage," he's not likely going to recall a news item about a tough
prison sentence and calmly decide that the crime he's considering isn't
worth it. That's just not the reality of how people behave.

This is why Guy Ritchie scorns tough-on-crime policies. They just don't
work, he insists. "Longer prison sentences have never been shown to be a
deterrent. When people commit crimes, they do not think about them."

Some might not be inclined to heed a convicted murderer. But he has lived
the reality. And, as a paroled lifer, that reality will be with him to his
dying day.