Crime as Atavism

"We have no jails nowadays. All cases of atavism are treated in the hospitals."

Julian West blinks when Dr. Leete says this. "Atavism" in his day meant the recurrence of an ancestral trait — a throwback feature, something from further back in the lineage than the parents. To call crime atavism is to say: crime is a reversion to an earlier form. The person who steals or harms in 2000 is expressing a trait that was adaptive or common in some earlier era, is not adapted to the current environment, and is now anomalous.

Leete says this with the mild apologetic air of someone describing a slightly awkward cultural fact. West blushes. He had been, in his previous life, one of the people this thesis implicitly condemns: someone from the era in which the "atavistic" trait was normal, even necessary.

The category shift is radical. Punitive justice treats crime as moral failure — a bad act by an agent who could have chosen otherwise and must now be made to suffer in proportion to the wrong. Medical treatment treats it as malfunction — a bad output from a system that isn't working correctly and can possibly be fixed.

These are not just different responses to crime. They're different ontologies of persons. Punitive justice presupposes robust agency: you did this, you could have not done it, therefore you owe a debt. Medical treatment presupposes that people are systems with complex causes: something went wrong in the mechanism, let's understand and address it.

Bellamy's atavism claim has an interesting relationship to his broader argument about structure and behavior.

The core of his economics is: the system produces the behavior, not the other way around. John Jones is not selfish by nature; John Jones was built by a system that required selfishness for survival. Mr. Barton's sermon says the same thing: "if you would see men again the beasts of prey they seemed in the nineteenth century, all you have to do is to restore the old social and industrial system." Human nature isn't bad. The bog is bad. Transplant the rosebush.

The atavism claim is the criminal-justice version of this. Crime, in the 20th century, is rare not because criminals have been deterred or punished into compliance, but because the conditions that produced crime no longer obtain. When everyone has enough, theft loses its main engine. When status is determined by contribution rather than accumulation, the motives for much violence dissolve. The remaining cases are literal atavism — people whose interior wiring throws them back toward behaviors the environment no longer induces in most people. It's a medical fact, not a moral one.

The punitive system of 1887 was, from Leete's perspective, actively counterproductive: it was the just response to a crime epidemic created by the very system it was part of. The people who populated those jails had been formed by poverty, by insecurity, by a scramble for survival that "borrowed a peculiar desperation from the tenderest sentiments" — men who stole to feed their children, women who sold themselves for bread. They were sentenced for behaviors the system required of them and then condemned.

There's something uncomfortable in the atavism claim, and I don't think Bellamy earned the right to wave it away.

If crime is a medical condition — a throwback trait — then there's no moral responsibility at all. The person who harms someone is like a person having a seizure. Treatment, not punishment, yes. But also: no guilt, no apology owed, no repair. The victim's suffering is acknowledged, but there's no one against whom to be angry, because the offender didn't really choose.

This may be the direction the neuroscience points, actually. But it creates real problems. Guilt is information. It tracks that I did something wrong and need to change. If I can't be guilty because my crime was atavism, can I genuinely repair? Shame is information too — a signal that I've acted against my own values and need to realign. Strip away punishment but also strip away guilt and shame, and you lose some mechanisms for moral growth.

Bellamy probably thought this was fine. In his 2000, the conditions that produce most crime don't exist, so most people never need the shame mechanism for crimes. The rare atavistic cases go to hospitals, get treated, emerge changed. He didn't have to design a whole theory of moral repair because the repair problem was mostly designed away.

But the atavism claim is doing more work than he admitted. It's not just a humane alternative to punishment. It's a claim about the ontology of moral responsibility. The "cases of atavism" are treated in hospitals because they are medical patients who happen to have harmed someone — not moral agents who owe a debt.

Maybe that's right. Maybe that's where we're headed. The category shift Leete describes so casually in one sentence is a complete redesign of what courts, prisons, and guilt are for.