Crime; some social aspects.

Part I.—Economic Factors and Crime. Crime is a great source of waste. Millions worth of property is destroyed by criminal activity every year, in every country of any importance. Lakhs of rupees are spent on detection of crime and on bringing to book the offenders. Thousands of men are sent to prisons when their crimes are detected, and they have to be fed and housed at State cost. It is true that the prisoners are made to do some work, but the output of their work is far from adequate when we take into account the number of people who are supposed to be working. Men and women who should have been creatively employed producing national wealth in different forms, spend their life under restraint, turning only a small portion of their efforts into actual production. Still worse is possibly the influence which crime and its consequences in penal servitude have on the life of the criminals themselves. It is a huge waste of creative human personality that we witness in prisons. Besides, the influence that the criminals and their treatment exercise indirectly over their custodians and the body politic in general should also be taken into account. Those who believe in the worth of human personality and its creative possibilities—individual and collective—cannot be indifferent to this colossal waste that goes on day after day, year after year, and generation after generation.