TRIGGERnometry - Theodore Dalrymple - The Truth About Crime

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

Enjoy this  darkly hilarious episode with former prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. In this episode, Theodore Dalrymple tells us why the UK is the most crime-ridden country in Western Europe, how crime statistics misrepresent the reality on the ground and more! SPONSORED by Identity Crisis - a book by Scott Bicheno. Buy it here: UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09419RG9K / US https://www.amazon.com/Identity-Crisis-search-meaning-losing-ebook/dp/B09419RG9K/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you take, for example, the number of recorded crimes per prisoner in this country, it's gone from six per prisoner in about 1910 or 1900 to 114 in 2000. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. A fascinating guest we have for you today. He's an author, cultural critic, former prison physician and psychiatrist, known best by his pseudonym, Theodore Dalrymple. Welcome to Trigonometry.

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. I promise to ruin your introduction. I think I just about got everything in. You have had an extraordinary life and your work is very, very interesting. Before we get into it, tell everybody about. about your background, who are you, how are you where you are, how have you ended up here talking to us? Well, I've ended up here talking to you because you invited me.

Quite. But I didn't break my way in or anything like that. But, well, I became a doctor. I went to Africa. I had a great desire to see the world, so I spent quite a lot of my life touring the world. When I was young, I had a slight attraction to danger. And then I sort of settled down and was a psychiatrist and prison doctor. And one of the themes of your writings, I mean, we'll get into a lot of them, but one of the themes is a word that, you know, if you were to utter it in the confines of a normal TV studio, I think people would have a meltdown.

But it is a word that is important, which is responsibility. It's something that you've written a lot about in the context. of our culture. What are we missing around that subject, do you think? Well, I think there's a lot of double-think going on in that people think they themselves are responsible, but they take away responsibility from other people. So they see other people as vectors of forces, if you like. But, of course, no one can think of himself as a vector of forces until that is he has to make excuses for himself when, of course, he begins immediately to talk about being a vector of forces when you do something wrong first.

thing you think of is excuses for yourself and then after a time you realise that you're you're telling yourself porkies and but sometimes people don't get that far they deceive themselves and often they're given shall we say advantages for for deceiving themselves in that way so they're both deceived and deceiving but and yet there's a still small voice that tells them that this is not true That's my belief. And you say that they get given incentives or get given rewards. What do you mean by this?

Well, one of the, let me give you an illustration. Once I made a terrible mistake when calling a social worker, because I had a patient. I won't describe the patient. But anyway, I said this is a particularly deserving case. Well, of course, deserving is not a word that you can use. Because if there are deserving cases, there must be cases that are undeserving or at least less deserving.

and that means that you make a judgment and making a judgment is a very bad thing to do though actually the idea of not making a judgment is itself a judgment so it is a consequence of being a conscious human being I think that you make a judgment and the only way you don't make a judgment is by being unconscious

so we all do make judgments I don't know whether that's... But we now pretend that we don't is your point and what culturally, what sort of impact does that have, in your opinion, across our society when we adopt this way of looking at the world? Well, I think it allows people to think that there's no other way than they don't have to make any effort to behave other than they are behaving. And in fact, there are quite a lot of people in the country, and this is a bad situation, who are no better off if they make an effort than if they don't make an effort. They have nothing either to hope for or nothing to fear. And that's an awful situation.

situation for a human being because it takes meaning out of life, meaning out of effort. But unfortunately, when you get to that situation, often you don't realize you're making decisions, you are making decisions, but they're often highly irresponsible ones and foolish ones. And you have been quite critical of the welfare state in some of your writings. And that is, dare I say, Anthony, a very controversial position. What is your criticism of it? Well, you see, I don't think, I wouldn't be critical of the welfare state.

I don't think the welfare state is, shall we say, a sufficient condition for what we're going through. There's a necessary condition. When it's allied also to this kind of non-judgmentalism where people don't think one thing is better than another, that's a recipe for disaster. So in some countries where they have a welfare state actually better than ours, which though it does actually make judgments, more judgments than ours, it's all right. If the culture is all right, it could be all right.

So it's not the welfare state in itself. It's the welfare state in conjunction with cultural developments. And what is the rite of our culture? Aren't we all right? Aren't we doing okay? Well, I mean, I suppose it depends which end of the telescope you're looking down, or whether you see the glass half full or half empty. I would say that, I mean, my view is that behaviour in this country

is worse than any other country that I know of comparable type. Behavior, what are you talking about? Well, the rudeness, the crudity, the litter. Just take litter. Britain is the most littered country. in Western Europe. What lies behind litter? People throwing away stuff without due care, right? Yes, but what lies behind that?

I would argue, and this is me being a miserable pessimist, a certain contempt, as in I don't care. Well, let, I mean, yes, I agree, and partly I suppose they don't even see it, or if they see it, they don't see that it means anything. But I used to go walk every afternoon, three afternoons a week, from my hospital to the prison next door, which was a few hundred yards. Two, I examined the litter on the way.

That was always litter. What I discovered was in the Englishman's street as his dining room. And you see what they eat, you see what they throw away. It's no wonder that there's an enormous amount. of obesity and so on and so forth. The other thing I learned is that the fundamental cause of car crime is good weather. Because when I went in sunshine, there was glass glittering everywhere, cars broken into. When it was cold or raining, there was no glass.

So I concluded from that according to a kind of sociological thinking that the real cause of car crime is good weather. But anyway, this kind of degeneration is absolutely everywhere. When you drive in this country, one thing I've noticed was very, to me, interesting and significant, is that after roadworks have been finished, nobody, neither the council nor presumably the contractor, takes away the notices and lets the frame just rot. And there are sandbags everywhere. Well, you don't see that in France. You don't see it in Spain.

It's because nobody has any pride in what they're doing. The council doesn't do it. The council, I won't talk about council. But they're not interested in that. That's beneath them, of course, because they're trying to reform human nature rather than pick up the litter. Boom.

So you mentioned reforming human nature. Yes. Now, that is interesting to me. Let's talk about that, because we're having this sort of slightly theoretical conversation about a few things that I may be indicative of this and that. Yes. Let's get to the core of it.

Yes. When you talk about councils trying to reform human nature, what do you mean? Well, they're trying to make people better than they are. And they're more interested in, if I may say so, political correctness, many of them, than in doing the things that councils are supposed to do, which is look after the towns and cities. my council does all kinds of things which you shouldn't be doing

but it doesn't do those things which it should be doing and this is fairly typical of our government and it seems to be worse in this country than other countries sorry I didn't mean to interrupt I was just I'm very keen on this point because I think it strikes to the core of some of the things that you believe and people might be watching the sense? Well, isn't it the job of councils to create the right incentive structure

to make people better than, quote, they are, as you put it? No, no, they're there to sweep the street. And if they don't do that, they can't do that properly. Well, I mean, I don't want them to change human nature. Of course, you can give people incentives. As we've talked about, you can give people incentives to make them better or worse, or at least not to make them better or worse. not to change human nature, but to make it that behaving badly has no consequences.

Or no apparent consequence. It does have consequences because, you know, you can't escape bad consequences, but not immediate bad consequences for ability to eat or have a roof over your head or anything like that. So we get all kinds of nonsense now about people changing sex and so on and so forth. And you see what happened to the professor of philosophy. She was in that chair a week ago. Oh, right. Well, she was saying things which I would have thought 20 years ago, no one would have thought

worth saying because it was so self-evident. And now she's been persecuted for them. It's true. She has been persecuted for them. Was there a particular moment, Anthony, where you started to see culture and the world changing? Or do you think it's been a gradual slow creep? Well, you could never point to a... I mean, you can't say that like Virginia Woolf had human nature changed on the 11th of November 1910

or something like that. Of course, it didn't really mean that. And you can't point to anything like that. If you start thinking like that, then you go back to the Garden of Eden. So obviously if you said, is there a point at which I saw culture changing? No, but it gradually dawned on me. And I suppose my experience of working as a doctor in a slum and in a prison did open my eyes. because most people in my situation, middle-class situation,

wouldn't even know that any of this existed. And in fact, once I was asked by a BBC correspondent, actually, a very nice man, a very distinguished man, actually. And he said, well, do you make it all up what I was writing? And I... That explains like the last 10 years. years in one sentence, doesn't it? Yeah. So, I mean, how he could have

avoided seeing it? I don't know, but people doing, I mean, there's a book in front, I mean, it's not only in Britain. There's a book just out in recent, fairly recently, out in France called the French archipelago, and it's written by a geographical sociologist, or whatever you would call him, who says that

now people are living in kind of, we're balkanized our own societies. So people outside that group and these groups are quite large. I mean, if you take the Bobo, the bourgeois bohemians, there are now hundreds of thousands or millions of them. So there's no reason why they should meet anyone outside their circle. And likewise, people who live in some terrible housing estate somewhere,

probably never meet anybody who doesn't live in a, except in, you know, if they're working in a supermarket or something like. that. So we live in a world in which we don't meet many people who are not like ourselves. And I was privileged to meet people who are not like myself, who were living very different life from me. And I was interested, and I think one thing that helped me was having traveled a lot around the world. And one time, for example, I went across Africa by public transport. And really all judgment is comparative. So having seen that, having seen, for example, how really poor people, I mean, I'm not talking about not having all the things they want.

They really had very little indeed and might not even have had enough to, couldn't be sure that they would have enough to eat the next week or month. and I saw that these people were actually dignified, polite, and in some ways more civilized than people in this country. What do you mean by that? Well, they behaved in a more seemly way. And I found that pretty amazing. Even though they had less, they had far more dignity with the way that they behaved them with people. Yes.

And why do you think that is, do you think because we indulge people here? Do you think it's because we're more spoiled as a society? Is it something to do with God? Well, I suppose I would be spoiled really. I mean, we're all spoiled, let's be fair. Yes. So, but I think people don't really know what that kind of hardship is. As they, I mean, it's not that long ago that people did know that.

that kind of hardship in this country. But anyway, I think people take a lot more for granted. And those people didn't take anything for granted. They couldn't take anything for granted. I mean, it's not that I advocate going back to living in that kind of poverty or anything like that. But that meant that poverty is not a simple phenomenon that impacts on human personality.

There must be something else. guess what you're getting at is in the West we have the notion that crime, misbehavior, whatever other behaviors that we don't like and don't want to encourage. People are often saying it's a product of poverty and your argument is... It's not. I mean, it's a... Well, you couldn't know that from statistics in Britain. I mean, when Britain was a lot poorer, it had a lot less crime. I mean, the level of crime has shot up immensely since Edwardian times. Now people will say, well, of course, the statistics,

you can't judge by the statistics because they're kept differently and so on. And there are reasons both for thinking that there was more crime than were recorded then, but also there's a lot of reasons for thinking there's much more crime than is recorded now here. So, I mean, in general, one can say pretty certainly that there's a huge amount of crime. I mean, it goes up and down, of course, from year to year. But there's an immense amount of crime by comparison with what there was before the First World War and even before the Second World War.

I mean, I've forgotten the exact figure, but there's more robberies in one London borough in a month than in the whole of Great Britain in 1930. So, I mean, it's anyone who can remember knows that this is so. Of course, they've been, again, they've been condescended to by criminologists who tell them that it's the fear of crime

rather than crime itself. But that's simply not so. And why has this happened? Oh, that is a difficult question. Right. And I'm not sure I can't say, well, I know this is the, here is the answer. Give us some pointers.

Well, for one thing, there's very little repression of crime. The criminal justice system is incredibly lax. And people think that we're hard on crime. We're not at all hard on crime. And every government that has tried to do something about it has been stopped by my forces that are beyond their control. But if you take, for example, the number of recorded crimes per prisoner in this country, it's gone from six per prisoner in about 1910 or 1900 to 114 in in 2000.

114? By comparison with six. Jesus Christ. So I worked this out from the statistics. This is known to the police. Okay. So in other words... You can commit as many crimes as you want, in other words, pretty much. Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as that.

I mean, it depends on... You're right, Anthony. You're right. If you commit murder, you probably go to prison. My point is, if you're allowed to commit 100,000, 14 crimes, that's not the state attempting to keep you from doing that. It's not really, no. The state is failing in one of its primary duties. And that is to keep people more or less safe as they go about their legal. Now, the point is that people like you and me don't suffer much from this. But in the morning, I used to hear the stories of people who have been the

victims of crime. In the afternoon, I would go and see the people who have committed the crime. I actually got on, I think I liked the prisoners, and they told me, of course, what they'd actually done by comparison with what they'd been charged with having done. And it was a very different story. And because they knew I wasn't going to tell anybody. Not specifically, I've told, I'm telling you in general terms, where I wouldn't say this particular prison did this and that. And all of them had done between five and 20 times.

and much they've been caught for doing. And the figures bear this out. I mean, the number of crimes that are actually solved in the sense they find out who did it and charged them. It's something like 5 or 8%. And when they are charged, nothing much happens to them. It's easier, apparently, to find someone who has been. convicted 40 times in prison than to find someone who has been convicted only once. Wow. So and when you consider that someone who's been convicted 40 times has probably done

between five and 20 times as much as he's been charged with, you realize that, you know, that things are not working out very well. In a way, I would say, this is grounds for optimism. because when you consider how pathetic our efforts that repressing crime are, the fact is there isn't much crime. I mean, we're not... I don't know about you, but I'm not tortured by crime or anything like that. I assume when I go down the street, I'm safe and so on and so forth.

I mean, it's not true. It depends where you live. But actually, the question is not why there is so much crime, but why there is so little. and that means that most people fundamentally are law-abiding. What is the reason for pessimism is that theoretically it should be easy to reduce the crime rate very considerably, and yet we consistently refuse to do it. And why do we consistently refuse to do it?

Because most people think that if you regard punishment as any part of the criminal justice system, you're a torturer or a sadist. And the truth is? And the truth is that I don't think, I'm not advocating bad treatment of anybody, but I think that the extreme, when we have a Lord Chief Justice who says that first-time burglars shouldn't be sent to prison,

he says they're first-time burglars, that already shows he has no idea what he's dealing with because the chances are they're not first-time burglars. That's the first thing. So he didn't know what he's talking about? The first time convicts for a bird. They're first time convictions. You must always remember that a conviction is not the same as the number of offenses.

And this is a very simple thing. The other thing that people forget is when they think, oh, well, he's middle class and so on. And so on, it's easy for him to talk. So I've had an easy life and all that. They don't know whether I have had an easy life or not, of course. But anyway, they can say that. And they say that criminals, on the whole, have had hard lives, and that's true. Many of them have had hard lives and so on.

But the fact is that the victims of crime are also poor. And since the number of victims is much larger than the number of perpetrators, failing to incapacitate the perpetrators is created. lots of victims who are and for poorer people who are not themselves criminals because poverty is not criminal it makes their life much much harder so in many ways what we're failing to do is we're failing to protect the poorest and most vulnerable people in society by these policies or methods or whatever you might want to call them exactly but you see what it enables people like me if i were of a different opinion and i probably would

have been in a different opinion if I hadn't worked amongst this for so long, is that it enables them to think well about themselves, they're being generous and so on, when they're not actually, of course, I mean, you could say, well, it's the means by which the middle class avoid having to pay more tax for a proper criminal justice system. And when you look at the people who are perpetrating the crimes, is there a type, as it were? Or is it just every different?

Could be a personality type, not necessarily come from. I never really thought that. I mean, obviously, you read, of course, that in prisons there are, that 70% of prisoners have some kind of psychological problem or psychiatric problem. I believe that's a whole load of hoaxom. And that is an excuse for the failure to deal. with a relatively few raving lunatics in prison, which the NHS is incapable of dealing with,

because it's so incompetent. And we've closed down all the psychiatric hospitals, so you can't send the lunatics anywhere. And you're allowed, in a way, rightly, you're not allowed to treat them in prison against their will. So they just stay there and rot. But you cover up that deficiency, which is a real, and, in my view,

should be an easily soluble, problem because it's not a huge problem. You cover that up by saying, well, there's 70% of them. Well, what can you do with 70% of 80,000 people? I mean, you can't do anything. But the whole process of diagnosis is so lax and that you can claim these things and nobody will bat an eyelid saying, well, this can't be true. Anthony, so I was a teacher for many years and I read a stat. And correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe it is wrong.

I think I read it in the Times' educational supplement so we can blame them if it's wrong. But something like 50% of all prisoners have a special educational need, whether it's dyslexic, whether it's, you know, things... I don't believe that for a minute. And it is said that prisoners are, on average, of lower IQ than the general population.

That may or may not be so. but I found that I never had to talk to the prisoners in any different way from how I'm speaking to you. Now that night... I mean, there's more than one possible interpretation of that. But I, when my interpretation was that they were not deficient in intelligence, they could understand everything perfectly well. And I never had to alter what I was saying.

I mean, of course, there were a few who were very noticeably of low intelligence, and there were some who were mad, and there were a few who were a bit like Hannibal Lecter, but they were very few. And generally speaking, I found them to be a perfectly adequate intelligence. That's very interesting. You know, Anthony, I feel listening to you a bit like a four-year-old talking to his dad and every question is why, why, why this, why that?

Because you're opening up boxes that we've not looked in on this show. So you've worked in a prison, you've worked with people in that situation. Just what are the things that people don't understand? What are the things that the myths that we keep being told? What are the things that we ought to understand about the prison system, prisoners, criminal justice, all of that? Well, I think, I mean, people, for example, people will often give you a statistic saying that we have more prisoners per head. You've probably heard this than any other country in Europe, which is only barely true because Spain has almost as many. But the statistic, the number of prisoners per head, is a ridiculous one.

Because, of course, you're not, there isn't an ideal statistic. Every country must have 100. prisoners per million. It's not a target. Irrespective of the number of crimes, I mean, if there were no crimes, then even to have one prisoner would be an outrage. So the fact that I've never heard anybody say that that statistic is ridiculous. It means nothing. It's only by comparison with the number of crimes that it makes any sense. And the fact is that this is the most crime-written country in Western Europe by far. Wow. So the fact that we have

slightly more people in prison per head of population actually points to the fact that not enough people are... The last time I looked at Eurostat, admittedly, it wasn't, it didn't have the latest statistics, but the number of violent crimes per prisoner in Spain was a fifth or a sixth of what it is in England. In other words, if you commit a violent crime in Spain, you're five or six times more likely to go to prison than you are in England. And only a criminologist would be surprised to learn that the rate of criminal violence in Spain is much lower than in Britain.

You have to have a certain level of education to be surprised by that. I mean, you probably are not all that surprised. I don't know. Thank you for that. We're very badly educated, as you point out. But again, I come back to the Y question. You made one point, which is, as a culture, we have become uncomfortable with the idea of punishment. And I feel that. I feel that in myself, I feel that even when I was growing up, the idea that people respond to incentives and punishment is a disincentive or an incentive, depending on the circumstances, was universally understood.

And by the way, sometimes that principle was misapplied. And the punishment was far too severe for people. The way children were treated was just outright wrong in many ways, right? People, you know, physical punishment and all these sorts of things. I would argue wrong. Why has that changed? I don't know, but let me just go back a minute. No one wants a society in which the only reason that people behave reasonably well

is because there's a policeman around every corner and if you don't behave well, then they get nicked. They get nicked. So you've got to try and distinguish what prevents people from becoming criminals in the first place is what you do once they have become criminal, once they start behaving criminally. And these two questions, they overlap a bit, but they're not exactly the same. And they are confounded. So when every people will say, well, what's the root cause of crime? The root cause of crime, of course, strictly speaking, is the decision to commit it.

A very unfashionable view nowadays. In fact, there can't be any crime without a decision to take, because if you don't take the decision, you're not criminally responsible. So in other words, although it sounds trivial, it is actually the case. And I always treated people as if they had made decisions. They might have been very bad decisions. There might be stupid decisions. They were forgivable, sometimes, not always.

although I don't like the word forgivable. I would say either excusable or comprehensible because I can't, if someone does something wrong to you, I can't forgive him. Only you can do that. I have no locust and I in the situation. But anyway, so people, and it's perfectly true, that it's difficult to be in favour of punishment

because punishment has been terribly harsh in the past and cruel, sadistic, actually. And, you know, when it was carried out in public, half as deterrence and half as entertainment, that was horrible. And, you know, one doesn't want to. On the other hand, one has to be realistic. So that, for example, the reason you don't park on a double yellow line is not because you Because I'm going to get a fine. That's why I don't park that.

And if I didn't get a fine, I would park that. Probably. Guaranteed. In my case, definitely. I mean, you knew two things. The chances of you're getting the ticket in the first place. And then when you've been having to pay the fine, if it was just the ticket, if they just told you, as the police now tell you, if you just assault someone or something, you don't do it again, where it doesn't matter.

I mean, you've been caught, but it doesn't matter. whereas with the ticket it does matter because you will be fine. So, yes. We started with the question I was asking you is why we've become uncomfortable about applying punishment. I think there's been a long process of propaganda, probably starting with the, I mean, if you have to put a start of it. I'm not saying that someone would come and say, well, it was before that. But if you take the Fabians, for example,

take someone like Bernard Shaw, would write about criminology. And he would argue all the things that I now oppose. Now, he was living in a society in which crime was actually a very minor problem. But he didn't know that. He couldn't have known that, he didn't know that it was going to explode later.

So many reformers, I think, do not consider the possibility they can make things worse rather than better. As they can make things better, but they can also make things worse. And I've just been to an exhibition at the Welcome Gallery, a Welcome Institute. Yeah. And it's about happiness. And they were saying how political activism. can make you happier.

And it can make things better. Well, that is true. It can make things better, but they can also make things worse. Because they gave an illustration of how, you know, marching in the streets and so on and so on. It exactly fitted the Nazis. You know, now, so there's an example of how activism can make things a lot worse. and this doesn't seem to be a problem for activists. I don't think many think, well, actually, things might get worse as well as better.

And nobody, Dr. Johnson said that all judgment is comparative. Now, what they compare everything with is some kind of utopian vision that they have in their mind, not with what actually exists and what has existed, and what could possibly exist. So they're not very good at making judgments. People are not very good at making judgment. And Anthony, why am I always hearing this statistic about you say that crime is exploded,

that violent crime is going down, that society isn't as violent as it used to be? Oh, well, that might well be true. I mean, it depends, you can not, it depends where, what you look at. So how you look at it, I mean, my financial advisor will always show you that your investments are doing very well. It depends. He carefully selects the dates from which the graph starts.

Yes, I take your point. So it might well be. I mean, if a crime rate halved, first of all, incidentally, there's abundant evidence of manipulation of the criminal statistics. I'll give you an example in a minute. But it could go down by half and still be incredibly much higher than it was in 1910. Now you can say, well, what's the standard of comparison?

I'm not saying that it's not a good thing if the crime rate goes down. Of course, we would all welcome that. But it's still very high. So what was the example you were going to give about this? Of this manipulation. Well, it used to be, there's a lot of... You've probably heard about the recidivism rate of non-custodial versus custodial sentences,

and that's always been extremely crooked statistic. Because, of course, while it starts from the period of release of the prisoner and the date of sentencing of the non-custodial sentence. Well, of course, while the prisoner is in prison, he's not committing criminal. crimes unless he's committing them against other prisoners, which can happen, of course. But it doesn't happen that often. So that in itself is a crooked comparison. Secondly, the people who are in prison have all been through the non-custodialism because they don't go into,

it's very rare that someone, except for a crime like murder, goes into prison the first time he's convicted. So he's been through the whole mill of rehabilitation, so on, before. before he ever gets to prison. But anyway, they used to use a two-year comparison. And suddenly, and they used to call it reconviction rate. And then they changed it to reoffending rate, which is a lie in itself, because the reoffending rate is not the same as the reconviction rate.

Committing an offense and being convicted for a... It's not the same thing. Right. And it will never be the same thing, and it certainly won't be the same thing with our police. So we're looking for the keys where the light is, as opposed to where we dropped them essentially on that particular issue. Yeah, and the fact is that you have to look at the statistics with extreme skepticism, and they make it very difficult.

So suddenly they change from a three-month, a two-year period to a three-month period. well, how on earth you're supposed to compare whether things are getting better, worse, or staying the same? You can't. It becomes impossible. And, Anthony, the one thing that I really wanted to talk to you about is the rehabilitation of prisoners. Is it effective, or are we just creating a system where someone goes into prison?

You effectively lock them in for 11 hours of the day, however long it is, and they come away learning nothing from the experience or anything, actually worse? No, it's not true that they... get worse and actually again prisoners rehabilitate themselves in a certain way because if you look at the age at which prisoners come into prison for a new sentence for crime not sexual crimes but crimes such as burglary or assault they stop spontaneously by the by the well before they're 40

really yeah so they're very very few i mean there are some of course but the idea that they go on and on for the rest of their lives is not true. Or at least they don't get caught after the age of them. They've worked out how to get past the system. That's the advantage with being a veteran. So that suggests that they are self-rehabilitating. And that, of course, I mean, would lead some people to say, well, there's a biological component. That's what I was going to say. which is probably true, the reduction in maybe a reduction in testosterone aggression, but also, I mean, the fact is it's a young mind's game.

If you want to run away, it's better to be young than old, as I can tell you, from experience. Not that I'm running away from anything, but I couldn't run away from anything very much. So, but anyway, so the idea of rehabilitation is, and it's not as if you're, It hasn't been tried. I mean, it's been tried, but it doesn't seem to work.

And except in the sense that people eventually, and that's a good thing, of course, that they eventually get over their life of crime. And presumably they find jobs and things like that. And I'm all in favour of that, of course. And what do you think about the whole having to disclose criminal records? Do you think that actually stops people from rehabilitating, entering into society or do you think it's a good thing?

You mean for job applications? Yeah, for job applications. I face both ways there. I mean, I'm in favour of, of course, allowing people a second chance and even a third chance or a 48th chance in some cases. But, and so I can understand why one shouldn't. On the other hand, if I'm employing someone to do my accounts, I would want to know that he was a convicted embezzler.

So I think it's a difficult, if you like, as an example of how there is no perfect solution to that particular problem. I mean, ideally what you would like is for people to know and to want to give people a chance. It's your decision that you say, you take this person, you're prepared to take the chance that he's reformed, or changed. But I don't see a simple solution to that, a simple rule. A rule will, if you make a rule, it'll be hard on somebody.

Yes. And we're talking about rehabilitation and we're talking about reintegrating people. What do we do with people who have offences, sexual offences? And how do you reintegrate those types of people into society? Because that is a question for the ages. Because when someone goes in for a sex-based defence, a lot of the time, and you could argue quite rightly,

their career is finished, their reputation is destroyed. Is there ever a way to reintegrate those people back into society? Or is... Well, again, I'm not. I mean, I think it's the same answer, isn't it? You want those people, you don't want people, I mean, you don't want people automatically to have a live sentence. On the other hand, you can understand why people don't want someone like that living next door to him. So I'm not sure I've got, I think we, there's no simple answer to that.

But also we have to get the sense of proportion in that this really is not a huge, vast problem like some other things are a much bigger problem. Before, I was going to ask you another why question, but let's stick with that. When you say it's not a huge problem, you mean statistically comparatively, obviously to the individual victim. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, the, the, I remember you can easily look very callous by saying it's not a big problem because then somebody comes along and says, well, it happened to me. Yes.

And I had a colleague who was caught, yes, caught out like that on a program. He was put in an audience and he was a psychiatrist and he was asked about schizophrenia and murder. and he said, well, actually he gave the statistics and so on and said this is not a huge problem and so on and so forth. And of course they'd put him next to a woman whose husband had just been murdered by a skips friend. And that, I'm afraid, is... That is not good.

Well, that is the technique of our television shows. And I made the comment for those people, but I also want to ask you what you mean by that, which crime is the big issue, you think? Well, there are several. And many smaller crimes, of course, are not individually very important, but are cumulatively important

and have bad effects. So that, for example, shoplifting, which is not a terribly serious crime, but if it's bad enough, It will drive people out of business and take clothes down shops and so on. And you can see it in suburbs of Paris. There are no shops in some of the suburbs in Paris. Nobody will open a shop there.

And it's not that, well, I mean there's arson as well. But so you can say that although each individual crime is not terribly serious, cumulatively it is very serious. but assault is very serious. If you don't mind me going a bit off the track here. To give you an example of what our police are like, or what some of our police are like, in the hospital in which I worked,

first of all, when I started, we had porters, then we got security men, and finally got a police station in the hospital. and that day of course did nothing. And once, on one occasion, a policeman watched a nurse being assaulted by a drunk and did nothing, didn't arrest the person or anything like that. Why not? Well, it's normal.

Well, because there's so much paperwork for fill in afterwards. And as one chief constable said to me, you wouldn't want our police to just be filling in paperwork, would you? So anyway, I mean, put it in print. So, anyhow. Didn't mind doing that paperwork. No. So anyway, and I wrote to the chief constable saying this has happened.

And he wrote back and said, no, no, it doesn't happen. Never happened. That didn't happen. So anyway, I left it. I was pretty disgusted by his answer. But anyway, he said, we always take all. all crime seriously, et cetera, et cetera. It's like a politician.

And, of course, the chief constables are politicians, they're not policemen anymore. But anyway, about three months later, notices started appearing all over the hospital, saying from now on, anybody assaulting a member of staff on the hospital premises will be charged.

Okay, which was an admission that what is, said before was a lie. And secondly, it was rather ambiguous anyway because it rather suggested that assorting someone other than a member of staff or not on the hospital premises was all right. And they often say, the police often say these things without actually understanding what they're saying. Hey, Francis, do you like books? I only like comics. That's why my favorite publication is The Guardian.

It's true. No one does satire and parody like they do. So, did you have a brilliant satirical book for me? Yes, it's a book by one of our fans, Scott Bicheno, and it's called Identity Crisis. It has been described as 1984 with jokes. So it is like The Guardian? No, no, no, mate. It's intentionally funny. So in present-day Northwest London, it tracks the personal journey of Cogshore Cityboy Dave Dolston through a period in which the government has decided to define everyone by their ego proverbs.

by a document called the ID card. It's a roller coaster ride through cancellation, redemption and spiritual enlightenment. The author has been a fan of trigonometry from the very start, and he has drawn a lot of inspiration from its conversations. So if you're a fan of trigonometry, then you're going to love this book. Anton, we are getting our 10% aren't we? Check it out on Amazon, guys. The link is in the description below. So let me come back to the Y question.

You said earlier that politicians had been elected to address this issue and were unable to do so due to, quote, forces outside of their control, I think, is what you said. Civil service mentality. I don't want to change. They're afraid also. I mean, I think they're afraid of... I think they're afraid of the Guardian, actually.

and the commentary and you see you don't get much you don't get much curious amongst intellectuals by saying the kind of things I'm saying I mean I wouldn't advise you to say it at dinner party you're operating under the very false assumption

that I still get invited to them which I do not you know I've given up attempting to be liked by people that I despise a long time ago but well I don't do despise them. I just think they're mistaken. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I once had, I mean, the only time I've ever persuaded anybody, actually, was a man called Jonathan Miller, the theatre producer, for whom I had a high regard, who was a very decent and obviously highly intelligent man, and he was a brilliant theatre producer. And my, you know, he was, had the standard view of crime and it's all poverty and all, and on himself, and I managed to persuade him a bit otherwise, and he just said, well, I don't have the argument against that, and therefore I must accept it. But that is very... No, when I say I despise, what I mean is there is a group of people that if you have the wrong opinion, see, they will ostracize you. They believe that you should be pushed out of

polite company, society, etc. To me, that is behavior that is worthy of contempt personally. But people take a different view. Well, I think what has happened, and I can't explain exactly why, I think that the idea of virtue is now almost entirely a matter of opinion. I mean, not in the sense that if you have the correct opinions, you're virtuous. If you don't have the correct opinions, you're a monster or you're a bad person. Now, I don't take that view because I think many people with the opinions that I consider wrong, a very virtue as good people. Quite.

So actually opinion is not virtue. So what is virtue? Well, that's difficult, but I think it must involve to a degree behavior. Oh, how old-fashioned. What a world. What a world that we live in. And do you think we need to reform the prison service?

think it needs radical reformation? I must say that I think things got better in my time. I mean, don't forget I've been retired from it for 15 or 16 years, so I'm talking entirely from memory. And I think conditions improved enormously, I'm glad to say, while I was in prison. I would like, I mean, the thing, I've said that rehabilitation, I don't really believe in rehabilitation,

but what I would like to see is more effort at cultural activity in prison. And I am in favour of education just because I'm in favour of education. And many of these people have had extremely bad educations and it's one situation in which they might get a good education. But it depends what you mean by fundamental reform. As in, do you think enough opportunities, is given to prisoners to learn skills, to improve themselves, to come out with a trade? Well, obviously, you can, I mean, I would be happy if it were increased.

Yeah, I mean, and I think that is so irrespective. I mean, supposing you made all the efforts in the world to improve it, and you found that actually it didn't decrease the recidivism rate. I would still be in favour of it because I think it's a kind of ethical thing to do. You ought to make an effort, even if it turns out that your effort isn't entirely successful. But I also believe that prisoners were capable of a lot more

than our society demands of them, not only them, but of huge numbers of people. people in this country. And you said you didn't believe in rehabilitation, quote, unquote. What do you mean by that? Well, I don't know. What do you mean by rehabilitation? I mean...

I mean... I mean... The first thing is that rehabilitation means that there's something wrong with them in the first place. Well, you could argue there is, isn't there? Like, going around... They'd make bad decisions. Is making bad decisions having something wrong with you?

I mean, if you're going around... I've seen some of the decisions you've made, I'll push back on that. I think if you're going around, you know, burgling 50 houses day in, day out, I think there is something wrong with you. I think if you go around and sexually assault someone, I think there is something wrong with you. Sexually assaulting is one thing. And I agree, for example, I met that this is a small number of people,

but you do meet people who, from the very earliest age, have done terrible things. So, you know, from the age of three, they put the cat in the washing machine and things like that. And whatever, you know, they do, they steal and lie when there's absolutely no advantage to it to them, and they don't learn, and then they become aggressive and so on and so. And it's very difficult to believe that there isn't something wrong with them in the sense that they've got a slightly different brain from others. And that's been recognised for a long time. You know, it used to be called moral insanity. that they were sane from every possible point of view

but they didn't have any moral sense and they never learned any moral sense so there are those people but the vast majority I don't think have anything anything wrong with them and as I said they do actually stop spontaneously most of them not all but most well let me give you a phrasing of rehabilitation

that you can then destroy with facts and logic so to me rehabilitating would be to take someone who's in prison for committing a crime, and they come out and lead a quote-unquote normal life. They have a job. They might have relationships, family, whatever, and they never... Well, they eventually do, as I said, they eventually do that spontaneous. When they're testosterone level drops and they're no longer trying to make the mark on the world.

And I'm, of course... But what I mean is take a 20-year-old. If you have a long time in... If someone has a long time in prison. It's reasonable to give him assistance to reintegrate into a society which, amongst other things, will have changed since he last saw it. And you can't just chuck him out and say, well, here's 50, we'd now get on with it. Which is largely what happens. But the same is true of drug addicts.

I mean, the reason rehabilitation for drug addicts isn't a medical procedure in my – this is my view. It's that drug addicts have destroyed their lives. They've ruined their relationship with their family. They know only drug addicts. It's very difficult for them to get a job because if an employer says, what have you been doing for the last 10 years, if they told him the truth, the drug, the employer wouldn't want him. So that is a kind of practical assistance that people need.

So they might, for example, need halfway houses and that kind of thing to get back on their feet. Whether you call that rehabilitation, I don't know, would you call that rehabilitation? Part of the process, I would think, yeah. Yeah, well, in that case, I would be in favor of that, yes. Because you can easily see that if you've wasted or ruined 10 years of your life, you don't just pick up the next day and proceeds if nothing has happened in the meantime. And where do you stand on imprisoning drug addicts?

who are heron addicts, for instance, causing crime after crime after crime purely to feed their addiction. Should we criminalise these people? Should we treat it as a help? Well, here, you see, I disagree with your characterisation of the problem. If you take drug addicts, as I did in the prison, who ended up in prison drug addicts, what you found is that most of them had been convicted, often many times before they ever took heroin. So insofar as there's a relationship between taking heroin and crime, it is that the attraction to crime attracts them to heroin.

And if you take heroin addiction, it's not something that just happens to you. It's not like Parkinson's disease. No one really knows where it comes from. And it's just one of those terrible things. Heroin addiction is not like that. Heroin addicts on the whole, the injecting heroin addicts. They go at it for about 18 months before. before they ever start taking it regularly.

They know all about it. To become a heroin addict, you have to know where to get your heroin. You have to know how to prepare it. You have to know how to inject it and where to get the syringes from. Most people find injecting something that they wouldn't really want to do unless they had to. So in other words, it's not true that heroin hooks them. They hook heroin. So it is a choice to be a heroin addict.

And furthermore, many, many just give up. So it is not true that they burgle houses just to feed their habit. And actually, heroin addicts and certainly morphine addicts in the 1920s, were perfectly capable of going out to work just like anybody else. Really? Yeah. So this idea... You've only seen they had a better time of it, I imagine.

So this idea of a junkie committing crime in order to feed his addiction. Shall we say it's very oversimplified. And I remember they used to say, one of them I remember, I should say, not they. One said, I went out to work, by which he meant he went out burgling from nine to five. I said, couldn't you do something other than burglar? Nine to five. Something a little less strenuous. And so I don't think it's a simple matter.

It's a simple matter. But let's say they are addicted. How should we treat that? Is it as a criminal issue or is it as a medical issue? Well, I don't think I would treat, I would say, taking heroin is criminal or treated as criminal in itself. But if they commit crimes, then I would say yes. Yeah. Well, I guess what Francis is getting at is what people call the war on drugs, the criminalization of drug use.

Well, I mean, when people say, I mean, I've had this discussion lots and lots of times, they say, well, if we, if we decriminalized, if we made everything available, so you could just go down the shop and buy your crack, then all the crime would disappear. I don't believe that. And I don't believe that needles are going to be beaten into plowshares once we've decriminalised things. I think that we will find something else. And people always say, well, look at Colombia, for example, how violent and so on. Well, people forget that Colombia was extremely violent, in fact, more violent, before the existence of cocaine,

or the widespread use of cocaine, as was Mexico. So the idea that if we could, if we decriminalized everything, I don't think, is there anybody who suggests we should decriminalize everything? No, but what about something like cannabis? That's where the battle lines are at the moment. Well, that is more discussable. However, of course, it doesn't necessarily mean there'll be less interference from the state. It might eventually be more because people will have to start being tested for cannabis all the time and so on and so forth. I mean, there are many situations in which people cannot, even if they're legal, even if it's legalized, should not take cannabis, for example, driving or you don't want your train driver to be high on cannabis or your... It will take, the service will take a lot longer. Yeah, it would, but we don't test people for alcohol in that way, do we?

Yeah, well, we do in a way, I mean, in the sense that we, I mean, most of the time, we're not allowed to be drunk. Actually, that's another thing. We don't enforce the laws against alcohol, being drunk and incapable or drunken disorderly. We don't do anything like that. And that's why all foreigners who come to this country are absolutely appalled. I am one such, and I was about to make the joke that it seems to me just British English culture more than anything

to be drunken disorderly on a Friday night. Yes. Well, it's not legal, but nobody enforces the law. And it wasn't, people will say, what about Jin Lane? They always say that once you start, as if nothing happened between Jin Lane and 1980. And so anyway, it isn't, I mean, of course it has become culture, but if it's become culture, it's a very bad culture. I mean that something is a culture doesn't mean that it's good.

Well, coming from a Russian, I think, criticizing British drinking culture, would be wrong. So let me instead move. Yes, I must say I've seen some fairly unpleasant things. Yeah, I'm not sure I could really pull that off. But let me final question before we get to our final final question, penultimate question therefore, what did you learn from working in prison all this time? I would say that everyone is equal. That's what I learned. For example, to give you an example, I'm not allowed. Are you allowed to swear on this? Of course you are. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Okay. Well, prisoners would come in, so I've got this fucking headache. So I'd say, well, before we go any further, what's the difference for a headache and a fucking headache? And actually, there is a headache that you can get on sexual intercourse, but that's not what they meant. My girlfriend suffers from it regularly. Thank you. Anyhow, so they'd say, well, that's how I speak.

And I say, yes, that's what I'm complaining of. That is going to be one of the most surreal conversations in the history of humanity. I can just see you there in your Tweed jacket. Carry on. So, I mean, when I said that, they could stop. No one had ever asked them to stop. But they could stop. They discovered it is possible to speak for longer than about three seconds without using that word.

Anyway, some would say, well, why shouldn't I? You know, that's the way I speak. And I said, well, supposing I said to you at the end of this consultation, here's some fucking tablets. Take two of the fuckers every four fucking hours. And if they don't fucking work, come the fuck back and I'll give you some other fucker. you'd be a bit surprised I would say so I established that I knew how to use the word

so I'd say we're equal I don't talk to you like that you don't talk to me like that so that's what I learnt I think what I'm hearing on the pinning all of that Anthony is that we pretend wait too much about other people's capacity to whatever it is, to behave, to, we pretend that

things, some people just can't do this or we can't not do that, or it's the way that we, you know, it's the, it's the childhood. And yes, the childhood is important. And yes, the education is important. But what I'm hearing, underpinning all of that is actually, if we call ourselves out and each other out on bad behavior, sometimes it's just because bad behaviour is easier or we're used to it or whatever it is. Yeah. Is that what I'm hearing? Is that right? Yeah, sorry. I would say that's roughly right. And I believe that that was your experience as a teacher. That is very much so. Part of the reason the school system is no longer fit for purpose is because of bad behavior. You cannot be taught. You cannot learn in a classroom

if there is a disruption every four to five minutes. No learning happens. And we don't want to talk about it. because unfortunately in the education system, things have gone so far to the left that it's almost seen as an act of oppression for a teacher. To say stop doing that? Yeah, and to have rules in the classroom. One of my colleagues and one of the best teachers I ever saw was described as right wing because she was a strict teacher.

This is a woman who dedicated her life to teaching in a poor-deprived primary school in East London. Yeah, yeah. And actually, I think, I mean, you would know better than I, that children are happier with that. Oh, absolutely. Because you know what? It makes them feel safe. Because when there is strict orders in place, when there is rules, it gives them a structure. And particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable kids, that's what they crave, because they don't have it at home. There we go. There we go. It seems to me common sense, really.

It does. But we seem to, and maybe this ties into everything that we've, talking about. We are living in a society which is rapidly abandoning common sense. Good ending, man. We had a lovely funny story and then let's just wrap it up on the fact that the world's going down the toilet. That's how I end all my gigs. Brilliant. Yeah, explains the reaction. Now, Anthony Theodore Dahl Ripple, thank you so much for coming on. We've got one final question for you as always, which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be. Well, I think we're talking about the death of common sense

and the centralisation of the marginal, so that what you get is a marginal phenomenon taking over our imagination completely. So that, for example, a good example is transsexualism. What comes next is the interesting question. Oh, hello. And what do you think is coming next? I think there'll be incest.

Explain. I think incest will be permissible soon, because there's no logical argument against it. I mean, I mean... But then you don't have to have children, right? You don't have to have children. So two consenting adults, quote unquote. Exactly. Go for it.

There will be celebrations up and down Cornwall. Mate, you did that joke last time, we got a lot of angry letters. No, I did it against Wales. No, you did Cornell the one before. before that. You're losing track of your own fucking jokes. Jesus Christ. Well, thank you for that. I really appreciate it. We've got a couple of questions for locals. I'm sure they're going to be even more problematic than that. But in the meantime, where can people find your work online? Well, which books should they buy of yours, particularly given some of the subjects we're talking about.

You would say that. Well, of course, Amazon you can find. I mean, it's not that I'm keen on Amazon, but it's very, but it's very convenient and, you know, various journals. I don't write much in this country anymore. I can see why. Make sure to check Anthony's work under his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple. I'm sure you will agree with me. It's been an absolutely incredible interview.

And we've got a couple of questions for locals we're going to ask in a second. But in the meantime, thank you so much for watching and listening. We'll see you very soon another brilliant episode like this one or Rorscho. They always go out at 7pm UK time 2pm Eastern Standard and the interviews are also available as a podcast if you like your Trigonometry on the go. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button so that you never miss another fantastic episode.

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