1% of the population is responsible for essentially all of the violent crime In the centuries leading up to Europe's heyday, it hanged 1% of each generation Practically every crime beyond the most petty minor offenses were capital crimes, and that was rigorously enforced. Horse thieves, robbers, murderers, and the like faced not "probation" given to them by a pro-crime judge, but the gallows and gibbet. And they faced it for centuries, from roughly the High Middle Ages to the Georgian period (the Victorians were soft on crime compared to their ancestors) Resultantly, serious crime mostly faded away. There are always pickpockets and serial killers, to some extent at least, but things like armed robbery can be mostly solved with consistent enough application of the gallows, as it plucks the crime genes out of the population Because it was freed from the burden of rampant crime, Western civilization could focus on doing great and noble things instead of endlessly subsidizing a criminal underclass We, on the other hand, have devoted every resource imaginable to subsidizing that criminal underclass that commits all the crime