I had a piece in Discourse Magazine the other week that I’d been working on for awhile, trying to think through both the need to enforce laws against minor crimes, and not treat offenders like “criminals.”

Of course, it depends on the crime, the number of offenses, etc. But what got me thinking about this was how so many people talk about fare evasion on the one hand, and speeding on the other. (These are probably the two most common offenses that come up in discussing urbanism, cities, and transportation.) There are different sets of people who seem to think one of these is serious and one is relatively minor. I haven’t encountered many people who feel the same about each offense:

What kind of offense is fare evasion?….

Most of the right-leaning suburbanites I know consider it to be theft, in the same category as shoplifting or, well, stealing something. Obviously, it is a small amount. But the type of offense they understand it to be feels serious.

Many of the same people, however, would generally consider speeding to be quite minor; certainly not criminal. Some would even view certain traffic violations as a sort of protest against the overbearing state. Libertarian intellectual Matthew Crawford suggests this in his book “Why We Drive,” in which he writes of the glories of splitting lanes on his motorcycle, or wheedling his way out of tickets.

Perhaps a majority of motorists view the whole panoply of traffic violations—overstaying a parking spot, speeding, failing to fully stop at a stop sign, gunning it at a yellow, even speeding through a crosswalk in which there is still a pedestrian—to be very minor, almost necessary offenses. They are simply a part of getting where you’re going in a car.

There’s a lot of reasoning—some would say excuses—as to why traffic violations are really just fine. Some would say a traffic violation, except a really serious one, is basically a victimless crime or an arbitrary offense, whereas fare evasion is a species of theft, no different in kind from shoplifting or porch pirating. It’s just not the same kind of thing.

Which brings me to this:

It does strike me as a bit odd and improbable, though, that it would just happen to be the case that the transit rider’s low-level crime is a far more serious offense than the motorist’s. Maybe reality simply decrees that the minor offenses committed by urbanites and transit users are somehow inherently more serious than those committed by everyone else. Or maybe it’s America’s deep anti-urban bias—in turn impossible to disentangle from our country’s racial history—that makes this feel true.

Honestly, this is probably more or less what I would have thought if I’d tried to put into the words the attitude I inherited about these things, growing up in the suburbs, thinking of the city as this chaotic, slightly lawless place. The idea that drivers were routinely putting people in danger, that breaking the speed limit or parking illegally for a couple of minutes was wrong in any sense, never really would have occurred to me.

But maybe speeding isn’t a good comparison to fare evasion, because it isn’t a kind of stealing. So:

Many people object specifically to the element of theft in it. What, then, about overstaying a parking meter? Sneaking into a second movie? Downloading a song you didn’t pay for? Forgetting about the income from a garage sale when it comes time to do your taxes? Taking a hidden egg roll out of the all-you-can-eat buffet so you can have a snack later? Grabbing a hotel breakfast when you’re not actually staying at the hotel? (Did you ever think of that one?) These are not any more or less “theft” than skipping the transit fare. But I would guess, to most people, they just feel different.

Maybe it’s just that we are more tolerant of the infractions we can imagine ourselves committing. We don’t want to judge too harshly our potential selves. We don’t want to think that we’re the sort of people who commit actions that might be considered “criminal.”

If I had jumped a turnstile when I was a kid, I’d surely have gotten in trouble with my parents. When I brought something out of a Chinese buffet for later? It was kind of funny. Eh, I could’ve eaten it there if I’d really stuffed myself. What if I’d just left it on my plate? That would be worse. They waste so much food, I’m just reducing food waste a little. I’m helping them!

We’re very good at taking an idea of ourselves and fitting our idea of everything we do into it. I’m not a criminal. Therefore, nothing I do is a crime. Isn’t it interesting how when I do sort-of wrong things, they’re okay?

For example, this anecdote I told in the piece:

Let me share a little anecdote along these lines. On a Facebook group for my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, I saw a post about our old speedway. A number of older folks were reminiscing about sneaking into the speedway without tickets to watch races. You’ll see the same kind of nostalgia on these group pages over the antics that then-teenagers got into in restaurant kitchens where they worked, or how they sneaked into R-rated movies, or how they tried to conceal beer in a car or what have you.

Why is sneaking into a race without a ticket just a good old memory? Do any of those people think they should have been arrested and thrown into the criminal justice system for that? Of course not. But I’d be willing to bet a non-zero number of them feel that way about fare evaders. Why?

My main point in all this is that “law and order” is too often a way of thinking not about offenses but about people—and other people, never us:

The hardest law-and-order rhetoric is not only frequently lacking in empathy or introspection. It is also profoundly un-Christian—not just in the sense that it denies charity to “criminals,” but in the even deeper sense that it imagines its protagonists to be somehow immune from sin. The core of Christianity is that we are all fallen and sinful, and that all of us have the capacity to commit evil. When we dismiss entire classes or demographics as fixed entities, we are not only being uncharitable. We are whistling past the graveyards of our own souls.

There’s more—read the whole piece!

Related Reading:

Crime and Housing

Benches for Whom?

No Harm, No Foul?

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