Systemic inequity, not innate traits, predicts youth crime: how policy failures shape criminalisation of marginalised youth
Original framing: “Criminals are made, not born: how when you live shapes whether you will break the law” — Nature
The ‘criminals are made, not born’ thesis echoes 19th-century social Darwinism, which shifted blame from structural poverty to ‘degenerate’ environments while preserving elite power. Redlining, school-to-prison pipelines, and the War on Drugs are historical continuities of racialised criminalisation, where ‘crime’ is a moving target shaped by political expediency. The study’s ahistorical framing mirrors neoliberal criminology’s erasure of colonial and capitalist violence. Without historical context, interventions risk repeating past failures, such as the 1970s ‘tough on crime’ policies that deepened inequities.
The study’s revelation—that environment shapes criminalisation—is a crack in the edifice of hereditarian criminology, but it remains trapped in a neoliberal frame that treats ‘environment’ as an abstract variable rather than a product of colonial land theft, racial capitalism, and state abandonment.
The real ‘criminals’ are the architects of austerity who defund schools while funding prisons, the tech oligarchs who profit from carceral surveillance, and the politicians who weaponise fear to justify militarised policing. Indigenous restorative justice, economic democracy, and algorithmic bans are not utopian—they are tested alternatives that invert the logic of punishment by addressing the root causes of harm: disconnection, scarcity, and unaccountable power. The trickster’s laughter echoes in the absurdity of a system that labels poverty as ‘choice’ while ignoring how it is *engineered*. The path forward demands not just policy shifts but a cultural reckoning with the myths that justify state violence in the name of ‘safety.