Investigating Blackout Crime in the Second World War (2022)

[mcpackieh]

Hmm, on one hand you have an environment of collective hardship and efforts to strengthen civil unity and resolve, and on the other hand you have newspapers and courts making examples out of criminals with strict punishments and harsh public rebukes. Is it really any wonder that the rate of crime motivated by selfish greed was suppressed? Those kind of criminals are usually sane, despite their compromised morality. Modify the risk/reward equation and they respond rationally to that.

Senseless crimes, women being attacked with knives or worse, continued. Such criminals are depraved and don't respond to normal incentives and punishments.

[BobbyJo]

> Such criminals are depraved and don't respond to normal incentives and punishments.

I think this has less to do with them being irrational and "depraved" and more to do with them being so poorly informed that their perception of risk/reward is unaffected by anything other than experience.

[TheCaptain4815]

It's interesting how they discuss the 'harsh' punishments of those men as a few months in prison

[mcpackieh]

I wonder how prison conditions then compared to today, particularly in the UK. I imagine it was a lot worse.

[nammi]

The Casefile podcast had a great two-part series on Blackout crimes last summer, one in London and the other in Berlin.

- https://casefilepodcast.com/case-218-the-blackout-killers-pa...

- https://casefilepodcast.com/case-218-the-blackout-killers-pa...

[AlbertCory]

Oddly enough, I'm in the middle of Bill Bryson's At Home and he talks about the early years of the war, too. Except he wrote about accidents. For a few months, the Luftwaffe was killing 6,000 people a month, and they weren't even bombing.