A century ago, the most successful gamblers who played the world’s stock markets were beginning to respond to a gut instinct that it was all going to go horribly wrong. The Roaring Twenties had convinced many leading lights of the economy that the financial boom would continue. They created more products, increased prices, kept staff wages low to improve profits, then were amazed when no one bought their stuff because they didn’t have enough money. So as usual it all collapsed spectacularly, and the world became poor and needed a war to fix it.
History books don’t explore many of the individual stories beneath the Great Depression of the early 20th century. Criminal records do. Anyone who waters down the connection between crime and poverty is trying to sell you something. In the US in the 1930s, the problem wasn’t poverty, they said, it was crime. And the solution was Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. It was described by one diarist as “the great garbage can of San Francisco Bay, into which every federal prison dumped its most rotten apples”.
