The normality of crimes

A couple of days ago a friend told me about a criminal act. Her friend, an elderly woman who was returning from work at night, was beaten up by a group of teenagers apparently for no reason. This fact made me think that nowadays, crimes seem to be inevitable, like illness, death or pain.

Under this assumption, I would like to present the following argument: If all societies impose systems of norms on their members, these rules would comply to the attempt to serve the purpose of normalizing behavior and prohibit deviations that society condemns. However, since human beings are very different and have tendencies to be original and creative, some of the forms of behavior they undertake will be among the prohibited ones. These prohibited actions range from prophetic statements condemning the existing society to antisocial behaviour classified as "criminal".

As long as a society imposes regulations, it will necessarily condemn actions that ignore those rules. If the punishments against for certain acts, for example -murder, is very hard, the violent crimes in that society can be reduced. Nevertheless, once this has been achieved, attention can be diverted to deviant behaviour that had been particularly tolerated. To illustrate this idea, we could think about a developing society where there is a lot of violence. In this society, differences in the norm of conduct are probably tolerated. But in a highly regulated society as in a class, where violence has been completely eliminated due to heavy punishments, the actions that are considered infractions would be whispering, chewing gum, using the mobile and similar things. In this way while there are rules, there will be infractions. Consequently, these deviations will be considered as regrettable and will be classified as deviant or inappropriate behavior. Therefore, wherever there is a system of norms, there will be deviant behaviour.

Considering the previous reasoning, there will be people who can affirm that human beings are educable and that antisocial tendencies can be eliminated over time. Others may say that as long as the differences are not eliminated, that will be useless. As I see it, all that is needed is for people to learn to be more tolerant of interindividual differences. I just wrote this and the following paradox arises: if, assuming an extreme position, it could be that the real origin of the problem is in the rules themselves, and/or if all of them were abolished and people could manage their free will, would the the antisocial behaviour disappear? .... Humm I just could not find an answer ...