The people's desire for safety and the government's desire to control the people, allow the clarion call for law and order to be made again and again and again. While there is something to be said about law and order, like many, many things, which side of the fence that you are on, makes a massive difference as to how you see it. For instance, if you are part of the law and order team, that is to say, in one way or another, you directly benefit or indirectly benefit from it, in the sense of employment, security, value and so forth, then of course, when you hear the call for more law and more order, you will support it, because it supports you in one form or another. On the other hand, there is the mass of population, which on a generic basis prefers harmony over chaos, safety over fear, and hence understands the basic need for some sort of law and order, but often are blithely unaware of how pervasive and thereby what a dangerous master law and order can be, when activating its own particular governmental sanction of law and justice.
There are a multitude of reasons why crimes are committed, some justified, and some not, but the first thing to recognize when it comes to crime, is the recognition that man's definition of it, is at times, both arbitrary and unfair. That is to say, if a small cadre of individuals make the laws, whether explicitly or implicitly so as to favor themselves at the expense of the people, then not only are these not good laws, they are, from an ethical perspective, no law at all. However, even in the case when all law is equally applied to all, which, by the way never occurs in actuality, there will invariably still be, laws that favor certain segments of the population over the general mass of people, because those with property and power, do not have the same mindset or concerns than those without those attributes, so that in practicality, the law though equally applied, is still unjust, because certain privileged members of society with plenty, won't have to worry about laws that penalize those with nothing; while those with nothing are often wont to find that their hands are thereby compelled to do something, frequently outside of the law.
If a man has no or little means to provide for his family, what real options does that man have? When a man hasn't been born into a fair deal to begin with, what is that man supposed to do? Those that have the money, those that own the means of production, those that own the lands, need the labor of the impoverished man in order to further enrich themselves or to maintain their position in life, but in the recognition that they are significantly outnumbered, find that the most expeditious manner to keep the poor man down, and in his place, is to effectively utilize both the arms of justice as well as the sword of might to beat down those that would even consider rising up.
If you never have been afforded your day in court, if you never for even an instance, own any land, the very land that your feet must tread upon somewhere each and every day, if you never have been master and thereby controller of your own means of production and labor, then what you receive in return, fair or not, is what those that own these things, those that are the law makers, those that are the strong arm of government, determine, without your input, to give you. It is no surprise, therefore, that those that are denied the full measure of the very bread that they create through their sweat labor, must, from time-to-time, go beyond mere appeals to the better angels in man's nature, and strike back at their oppressors, who call these actions, crimes, and enact therefore punishments.