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Are men natural born criminals?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11342408/Are-men-natural-born-criminals-Prison-numbers-dont-lie.html

Came across this on my news feed today, but was unable to read it since the Telegraph app doesn't seem to have a search function (or Women section) and had hit the limit on here, but it sounds like a re-run of the whole Darwin Award business (and I'm not even going to get going on the fact that there is a Women section but no Men). However, given the wording of the headline and the fact that it's in the Women section, which has a tendency of posting crap, I can gauge what form it takes from the comments on both Facebook and the article itself.

What they simply seem to do is say "95% of prisoners are male, 5% are female, men are criminal by nature" and more or less leave it at that, and apparently it's fine to say that. Now, let us consider two things here:
1) Men are often convicted of a crime when a woman would not be (with the same evidence); or conversely a woman would get off where a man would not;
2) Men tend to get longer sentences;
i.e., a man is more likely to get sent to prison and will stay there for longer.

Now, let's look at an alternative headline to the same effect: "Are black people [or any other group that can be argued in the same way] born criminals, Prison numbers don't lie"
Other alternatives include foreigners, but I think I'll stick with blacks because we're worse than the US there (amazingly, then again, I guess they just shoot them instead of incarcerating them). So, running the same logic, ~25% of the prison population are from minority ethnic groups, 11% are black. However, only 2.8% of the British population are black, ergo they are inherently criminal. But to say this would get you vilified and branded a racist.

Similarly, 29% of those ethnics were foreign, so about 8% of the prison population. Of course, the declaration relies on the number of non-Britons living in the UK, but to make the declaration that foreigners are inherently criminal would have you branded a Xenophobe.

Although, given that it's only of the ethnics, I can quite safely say that <8% of the population are foreign nationals and members of other ethnic groups, so let's brand me as a xenophobic racist too for applying the logic of the article (as derived from comments).

Reply 1

Unkempt_One

Except that's not what the article is saying. You're taking five words from the headline and claiming that summarises the content of the article, which is absolutely not the case.

Reply 2

caravaggio2

He is correct in what he says though. Change men for black or Asian(either of which could fit) and you would be hanging on a hook round these parts.

Reply 3

Evening

Because men have the balls (both literally and figuratively) to be criminals. Plus I think the statistics are misleading since women tend to get off with a lot more than men in law.

Reply 4

Asolare

Will read it all later properly, but just quickly skimmed.

The factors most commonly thought to contribute to crime - a lack of education (half of prisoners have no qualifications, compared with 15 per cent of the general population); experiences of violence or abuse as a child (41 per cent of prisoners witnessed domestic violence as a child and almost a third experienced abuse); financial difficulties, and so on—affect men and women alike.

I think you'd find that men lose out vastly in the education system compared to women (not just in terms of numbers either), the effect on males would be much damaging than for women so I don't get that point..