By T‑Paine
Published: 09-04-2025
Crime is a myth. Not murder, not assault, but the petty "crime" you hear about every night: theft, vandalism, disorderly conduct. The news tells you to fear "crime." A broken window. A stolen purse. A kid caught shoplifting at Walmart. They make it sound like the streets are swarming with villains. But here's the truth: crime isn't some natural disaster. It's a story manufactured, sold, and weaponized.
But you don't believe me. You think the law comes from just and reasonable minds, or worse, that it grows out of the ground. The sad truth is crime is only a byproduct of the law, and the law as it turns out, can be manipulated by people.
If I decided today I didn't like green pants because I found that particular color offensive, got enough key people around me to agree on it, got a legislature to write a law, those people I convinced to vote on it do so—boom. It’s now illegal to wear green pants.
You say: "come on, now, that’s silly." To that I say: "not if I had billions of dollars."
What if I could create propaganda ads in newspapers and on TV, streaming on YouTube, or even as simple as pamphlets at your local supermarket? What if my propaganda laid out sensible sounding logic, and appeals to emotion. "Green pants killed my father" I'd write. "The color has been shown in studies to distract drivers, and one such one is exactly who struck my dad. Green pants are dangerous." You know this would work on people, we see it happen every day.
And don’t stop me there, if I’ve got that kind of money, I also have the kind of money that can go toward donating to political campaigns, action committees, and lobbyists. Maybe my propaganda doesn’t convince everyone; doesn’t matter, the senator who I pay 5 million a year towards his campaign has promised me that we have a meeting next Saturday to discuss this "very concerning" green pants issue…
That’s not just theory. History is full of examples where things were suddenly labeled "crime" not because they were dangerous, but because it suited those in power. After the Civil War, states across the South passed “vagrancy laws” that made it illegal to be unemployed or homeless. The real goal wasn’t public safety, it was to round up freed Black people and lease them out as forced labor. Decades later, alcohol was banned during Prohibition, then legalized again. Marijuana went from legal to criminalized, and now back toward legalization in many states. If "crime" was a real and permanent category, how could the same act swing back and forth depending on the year?
And it’s not even far-fetched. Cities across the US actually passed laws against sagging pants, not because they were dangerous, but because they were associated with young Black men. When lawmakers want to criminalize something, they can, and they don’t need much more than fear and money to do it.
Crime isn’t some mystery. People aren’t born bad. There are no early warning signs for "criminal behavior" nor is there a psychology behind it. Crime happens when good people are pushed into bad situations because they don’t have the resources they need to survive. Stealing, selling drugs, bootlegging, counterfitting: all are just illegitimate ways of making money.
And here’s the thing: the people in power need you to believe in crime. If the public thinks crime is everywhere, politicians can run on "law and order." Police departments can demand bigger budgets, more officers, and military gear. Private prisons get contracts to keep their cells full, and corporations use prison labor to pay people pennies an hour. The panic about crime is profitable. If crime actually went away tomorrow, half these industries would lose their reason to exist.
Poverty causes crime. Adults in poverty are more likely to be arrested than adults above the line. If you can’t pay rent, if your job pays too little, if schools are failing your kids, what choice do you really have? A man in a suit can steal millions and never see the inside of a jail cell. But if you steal groceries to feed your family, you’ll be punished harshly, made into an example. That’s not justice. That’s class war.
In 2022 when food prices shot up faster than wages, the National Retail Federation and groups like FMI (the Food Industry Association) reported major increases in grocery shrinkage. The same period saw record numbers of households using food banks. Over 60 million Americans visited food pantries in 2020, and demand spiked again in 2022–23. In New York, when police actually stop and check what people are stealing, it’s not flat-screen TVs. It’s baby formula, packs of chicken, and cough medicine.
But you’d never know that from the evening news. Turn on your local broadcast, and the lead story is almost always a shooting, a robbery, or a petty theft—rarely wage theft, pollution, or corporate fraud. It creates the illusion that crime is random, constant, and mostly about poor people breaking into things.
Meanwhile, the crimes that cost workers the most (stolen wages, unsafe working conditions, landlords neglecting housing) are barely mentioned. It’s not a coincidence. Fear sells. And a scared public is easier to manage. Crime statistics aren’t just "bad people," they’re economic indicators that measure desperation in real time.
Most people aren’t ready to have the conversation because they still want to live in the manufactured reality they were sold by the media. That good people follow the law, bad people do crime. That crime is a justification for force. The myth of crime keeps people scared. And when you’re scared, you don’t ask why things are the way they are, you just accept more cops, more prisons, more punishment. Crime isn’t about safety. It’s about control.
That's why we have to stop thinking of "crime" as a measure of morality and start seeing it for what it really is: a tool. The law doesn’t just punish wrongdoing, it decides who counts as a threat. When times are hard, when people start questioning the system, that tool gets sharper. "Crime" becomes the excuse for more cops, more prisons, more surveillance. Not to make us safer, but to keep us in line.