Bad person

(c) Criminonymous

In this latest piece, Criminonymous posits that any definition of 'crime' is contingent upon time and place. None of us are wholly innocent. Does imprisonment, and its associated sanctions, work?

There are people who break into other people’s homes

People who trespass on private land because they want to roam

A drunken person might steal a phone and a garden gnome

And then there’s couples whose love is a crime and a sin

People whose political views are deemed worthy of prison

People who transgress to achieve an end they were taught was legitimate

What you consider deviant depends on what you see as normal

What you see as bad depends on your experience of sorrow

The norms we adhere to shift like the continents

Our priorities change, but no one keeps on top of it

We all want safety, irrespective of our stance

But the people in the jails are mostly there by chance

We don’t fight crime; we define crime

We respond when we can, but for the majority of offences

There’s no such thing as a plan

That can effectively stem all the illicit demand

We blame cops too for the culture in which they live

Like with any gang culture, recruits may be of a certain creed

But to reintegrate, our forgiveness is what they need

Police are as manipulated as everyone else

All mental health is suspect in and of itself

People are fragile

Liable to influence by their surroundings, like the hopeless in prison

The futile stockpiling of our brothers and sisters

And when they’re out, these erstwhile exiles

No longer fit the profile of a worthwhile punt

They must be imbeciles; their values must be totally different

Can’t reconcile employment with debilitating criminal illness

Forgetting that crimes are committed by almost all of us

What if everyone was charged the first time they tried drugs?

Everyone who shoplifted, downloaded a song, sped or littered?

Caught or not, it’s the overwhelming majority

That’s the sheer insanity of the us-and-them mentality

Our primal hostility masked as higher morality

Assumptions of purity are no more than an illusion

We prescribe division like our laws were the words of a god

And to break them is to trash our religion

But if you put everyone corrupt in jail, who will be left to lock us all in?

It’s a war of attrition that we’re never going to win

(c) Criminonymous