Ageing out of crime

I was reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s recent article on Covid-19 not being an old person problem. This is of course very interesting issue for me, given that I am, like most of us, perpetually ageing at a specific rate. But professionally it is significant, because I am a public defender. Most of my clientele is under forty years of age.

We say in the game that people age out of crime. The most common refrain I hear from my clients (and of course this is all anecdotal) is that they are too tired or too old for this shit. Every time I hear this I flashback to the Lethal Weapon movies and Danny Glover’s successful trope of getting too old for this shit. He was younger in the first Lethal Weapon than I am now, and he was playing a man ten years older than he was.

I have represented a few professional killers whose criminal careers abruptly ended, not because they were done with their criminal impulses, but because they had finally reached an age where consequences had meaning. Even young psychopaths get old. As PJ O’Rourke famously recounted in his chapter on Sweden in Eat the Rich, the Swedish ministry of health had published a pamphlet encouraging the young to cooperate in the care of the elderly. It had the sagacious title, “Oldsters are merely youngsters who have grown older.” Perhaps it loses something in translation, but the idea is clear.

Youth is wasted on the young; that is, after all, its purpose. Without regret and the birth of wisdom, we’d never change our behavior. The reason that we don’t allow most character…