Most (though certainly not all) crime is rooted in poverty. When people are paid starvation wages (and in much of the country that's what the minimum wage amounts to - it's simply not enough to even put a roof over your head and food on the table), and at the same time bombarded non-stop with extremely powerful advertising from a culture based on brand names and material acquisition as an indicator of status and instant gratification ("Buy now! Get a loan! Get several loans, followed by one big 'consolidating' loan! And half-a-dozen credit cards! Worry about the consequences later!"), it's hardly surprising that they'll crack under the pressure.

Poverty isn't an excuse for crime, but it's more often than not the core reason, and while you have poverty you will always have crime. Sure, in a "perfect" world everyone would know their place and obey all the rules (no matter how immoral those rules were, of course), but until they invent human cloning and genetic manipulation we don't live in such a world, and all the prisons in the world won't solve the problem.

This is the core flaw with the unfettered free-market economics currently in vogue in most of the democratic world (and many of the more unpleasant posters on this forum), and ironically it's the exact same problem as with Communism - neither of them take account of basic human nature.

Just like it's human nature not to want to hand over all your hard-earned wealth to the State in order to subsidise lazy scroungers, it's human nature to object to being forced into a miserable existence of near-slavery for the benefit of some already-obscenely-wealthy fat cat cunt who's just given himself a 100% pay rise while sacking half the workforce, and, if pressed hard enough, to resort to illegal means to alleviate that misery.

Free-market apologists present the capitalist system as "freedom", but in reality it's a de facto dictatorship, only using money instead of guns as the tool of oppression. They say "But anyone can rise up if they work hard enough", but that's like saying "Anyone can win the lottery". In theory and in itself it's true, but in reality one person can only become rich if millions of people are made poorer in order to fund it. The planet has a finite amount of wealth. When disproportionate amounts of it are concentrated in a tiny minority of the population, it didn't just appear magically out of nowhere. It was taken FROM everyone else.

Ultimately the ONLY solution to crime is a more equitable society. But a more equitable society is entirely at odds with with the fundamental nature of capitalism, which is a "survival-of-the-fittest" creed, devoted precisely to making society LESS equitable, by rewarding the greediest. So, um, we're fucked. Until either we find something better than free-market capitalism as a basis for national economies, or perfect the totalitarian surveillance and control of "1984", expect more and more crime. And I know which of those two solutions we're moving towards.