New Issue Brief: Understanding Crime as Entitlement

NEW YORK, NY — For decades, criminologists, advocates, and policymakers have advanced socioeconomic solutions to reduce lawbreaking. But insisting poverty drives offending doesn’t compute with the enormous crime declines over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which occurred without significant improvements in socioeconomic conditions. In a new issue brief for the Manhattan Institute (MI), Iowa State University professor Matt DeLisi, University of Cincinnati professor John Paul Wright, and MI senior fellow Rafael Mangual offer an alternative view of what’s at the root of serious crime—one focused on psychology rather than socioeconomics. They call it “crime as entitlement.” 

Though entitlement does not always lead to criminal conduct, it is an important, yet underexplored, driver of criminal behavior. Unchecked entitlement, which informs the thinking patterns and mindsets many criminal offenders share, can breed self-indulgence and become foundational to conduct and personality disorders, including antisocial personality disorder. Though this challenging condition which inclines those affected towards impulsivity and recklessness is relatively rare in the general population—with prevalence averaging between 2% and 3%—it is very prominent among prison inmates with prevalence estimates ranging from 40% to 70% among male prisoners.  

In light of this reality, those seeking to craft interventions through public policymaking must reorient their approaches around an understanding of entitlement as one of the single most important “root causes” of crime—one that cannot be treated by financial benevolence from the state. Ultimately, the underappreciation of the role that entitlement plays in crime has three important policy implications: 

• It runs the risk of leading far too many scholars, public intellectuals, and policymakers to approach crime policy from the assumption that the main driver of criminality (especially violent criminality) is economic deprivation; 

• It risks feeding an overestimation of society’s capacity to develop and deploy workable and sustainable policy interventions to the psychological underpinnings of criminal offending; 

• To the extent that entitlement is deeply engrained in criminal offenders, incapacitation and deterrence will continue to be ends best served by state sanctions for criminal conduct, as well as the most effective means by which society can hope to minimize the exposure of vulnerable individuals to criminal victimization. 

While many decision-makers may be motivated by an admirable sense of compassion, it is imperative that they don’t undermine the rules whose enforcement is necessary to curb criminals and protect the innocent. 

Click here to view the full issue brief.