Crime Doesn’t Happen Because People Are Evil.

When we talk about crime — especially in mainstream media or political discourse — the conversation often centers around one incredibly flawed concept: that people commit crimes because they are “bad” or inherently “evil.” It’s something straight out of Monty Python, I swear.

“How do you know she’s a witch?”
“Well she looks like one!” Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1975

The reality is that this oversimplified narrative borders on laziness. It overlooks and often excuses the complex web of social, economic, psychological, and systemic factors that drive most criminal behavior. Crime doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is not a reflection of someone’s soul being rotten. It is a reflection of their environment, their circumstances, and their unmet needs. When we stop labeling people as evil and start asking why they committed a crime, we open the door to solutions that actually work.

The Myth of the Evil Criminal

This myth persists because it’s easy. It provides a clear villain, a simple story, and a sense of moral superiority. “That person is a criminal,” people hiss. Slow down there, Skippy. Put your misplaced moral outrage aside, because American life is so overcriminalized that the average person commits not one, not two, but three felonies a day.

The real world is cruel and messy. Most people who end up in the justice system are not violent masterminds or malicious by nature. They are often poor, traumatized, under-resourced, mentally ill, or addicted — all conditions that our society tends to criminalize rather than treat. Labeling people as evil lets us ignore our responsibility to address poverty, housing instability, education gaps, and untreated trauma. It helps us justify punishment instead of exploring prevention and healing.

Poverty and Economic Desperation

When basic needs go unmet — food, housing, income — people may break the law to survive. Stealing a loaf of bread isn’t about being immoral. It’s about hunger. Survival is a powerful instinct, and criminalizing it does not change the underlying conditions that made it necessary.

Poverty is a significant predictor of crime born out of desperation. Individuals in impoverished neighborhoods are more likely to experience violence, victimization, and engage in criminal activities — and this correlation is not due to moral deficiencies. It reflects the structural absence of resources and opportunities that poverty produces. Research has found that neighborhood poverty and associated structural factors continue to predict multiple crime-related outcomes, including exposure to violence and risk of victimization. The environment shapes the behavior. That is not an excuse. It is a fact the system consistently chooses to ignore.

Trauma and Mental Health

Far too many people who end up in prison have lived through abuse, neglect, or violence. Their actions are often coping mechanisms or expressions of untreated trauma, not evidence of moral failure. Many individuals who commit crimes have histories of trauma and untreated mental health conditions. Research has documented that people with psychiatric disorders are significantly more likely to be involved in crime outcomes, especially when comorbid with substance use disorder. This is not to say that mental illness causes crime — it is to say that untreated mental illness, in the absence of community support and access to care, contributes to behaviors that get criminalized.

When communities choose not to invest in mental health care and basic human needs, they become responsible for the outcomes. That is not a comfortable thing to say. It is an accurate one.

Addiction and the Failure of Criminalization

Substance use disorders are often treated as criminal issues rather than the public health crises they actually are. This approach fails to address the root causes of addiction and instead perpetuates cycles of incarceration that do not improve outcomes for anyone. Research has consistently found that treating drug-involved individuals provides a meaningful opportunity to decrease substance abuse and reduce associated criminal behavior. Criminalization does not. It just moves the same unresolved problem around.

We need to get back to letting medical professionals do their jobs — not relying on politicians, law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges to interfere in topics they are not educated to handle. And the urgency is real. Michigan counties received millions of dollars as part of opioid settlements specifically designated for treatment and prevention. Much of it has sat unspent. A Michigander dies from opioid-related causes every four hours. Our leaders are choosing to let money sit rather than help their citizens get better. Common sense is not prevailing.

Systemic Failures and the Michigan County Budget Problem

The criminal justice system often fails to provide adequate support for individuals with mental health and substance use issues. Underfunded mental health services, absent addiction treatment, and the absence of rehabilitative programming in correctional settings all contribute to higher recidivism rates — and to reduced public safety. This is not a mystery. It is a documented outcome of documented choices.

Addressing these failures requires a multifaceted approach: increasing funding for mental health services, reducing stigma around mental illness, implementing evidence-based practices for treating mental illness in correctional settings, and actually spending the opioid settlement money that was designated for exactly this purpose.

Compassion Is Not Excusing Harm

Some will argue that understanding why someone commits a crime is the same as excusing it. It is not. Accountability and compassion can coexist. You can hold someone responsible for the harm they caused and simultaneously recognize the systems and trauma that shaped their behavior. Those two things are not in conflict. In fact, holding both at the same time is the only approach that has any realistic chance of breaking the cycle rather than just temporarily interrupting it before recycling the same unresolved conditions back into the same communities.

If we truly want safer communities, we need to stop asking “how do we punish the bad people?” and start asking “how do we prevent harm in the first place?” That means investing in housing, education, mental health care, restorative justice programs, and job training — not more prisons and harsher sentences that demonstrably do not produce the outcomes we claim to want.