Howard Jacobson: Military service, crocheting and ping-pong – that will separate the men from the boys

The findings of the British Crime Survey were published last week. And it's good news. Crime in this country is falling at record rates. So you only think you've been knifed.

Whether this sudden outbreak of peaceable behaviour is to be attributed to improved policing, the installation of more CCTV cameras where they're needed (ie everywhere), or an upsurge in public virtue, we will probably never know. It could just be that everyone capable of committing a crime is now in prison.

We worry too much about sending people to prison. So what if we have more people immured than any other country in Europe? We have the greater need. I wouldn't boast about it but I wouldn't go around apologising either. We were the first to have an industrial revolution, therefore the first to have a proletariat. Breed people for the single purpose of manning machinery and you are left with the problem of what to do with them when machines learn to man themselves. Either you re-educate them, recalibrating their aspirations and theology, or you pay them to go on living as they did when they had a function, keeping them poor, drunk and befuddled but idealising their way of life. We have chosen the latter course. We will not talk down to you, we say, we will not teach you how you might to more purpose fill the vacancy of your hours – because that's elitism – we will simply venerate your salty values and send you to prison when they encroach on ours. And behold the wisdom of our methodology – crime figures falling at record rates!

Though that might not be because everyone's in prison; it might be because we're running out of victims. Kill enough people and eventually there will be no one left to knife. Only imagine how good the crime figures will look then.

In the meantime we must remember the first rule of any successful society: neuter the young males. I don't mean literally neuter them, though there are without doubt some for whom nothing else will work. Russell Brand, Ronnie Wood, people like that. I mean neuter them metaphorically, subject them to what used to be called discipline, enlist them into our armed forces, divert their feral masculinity into other channels. In my day they turned us into a species of girl – gave us books to read, poems to memorise, paint and plasticine to play with, even taught us how to crochet. I can't remember at what age we stopped winding multicoloured strands of wool around cardboard to make doilies for our mothers, but I think we were quite advanced. I won't say this got me through the worst years of my adolescence, but it helped. The devil finds work for idle hands and all that. Where did that saying go? Crocheting kept our fingers busy, anyway.

And what doilies couldn't reach, literature did. It is hard work persuading people that reading Middlemarch cuts criminality, but you tell me the last time a young male apprehended for a knife crime was discovered with anything by George Eliot – even something small like Silas Marner – in his pockets. We were capable of incivility, rowdiness and bullying, we who studied A-level English literature in the 1950s – the last time you could use a phrase like English literature without being laughed at – but we never dreamed of pulling a knife, not even when one of us got to Oxford or Cambridge and the other didn't. We couldn't have used a knife. We couldn't have tolerated the sensation of its going into human flesh. And we had too vivid an apprehension of consequences – emotional as well as retributive – to perpetrate such an outrage – for we knew it to be an outrage – on the body of another person. Reading does this – it sensitises you to other people's pain, it sensitises you to yourself, it awakens the faculties of sympathetic imagination. There are readers who commit violent acts, but there would be fewer violent criminals – and I don't invite discussion on this subject – if there were more readers.

The other routine part of our education in the days before knives was the cold shower. Every male between the age of 10 and 17 should be subjected to at least one cold shower a day. Of the utopianists who have laid waste to our civilisation these past 100 years, the most destructive have been the sexual liberationists. The sexual impulse can be a glorious thing a) when you are able to assert some ascendancy over it as to time and place and person, and b) when it enjoys reciprocity. Since neither ascendancy nor reciprocity can be guaranteed, the sexual impulse, at least among young males, is more usually a plague to all parties to it, not excluding the male himself who prowls around the planet bemused, rebuffed, aggressive, vengeful and highly dangerous.

On their own, cold showers won't expunge sexual incoherence; they must be topped up with exercise and fatigue, sport or, best of all, military service. I missed out on national service by a couple of years, though as a reader of Middlemarch I had no need of it. But I played table tennis. We all did. If you were a boy you belonged as a matter of course – indeed as a matter of social requirement – to a youth or social club where table tennis was de rigueur. As with English literature classes so with ping-pong practice: I never once saw a knife pulled in the course of either.

"Take the toys away from the boys," the Greenham women used to chant, confusing politics proper with the politics of gender. It would have served their cause better as feminists had they understood that you must distract the attention of young men with as many toys as possible. This might sound paradoxical but a man is never more out of harm's way than when he's at the controls of a fighter plane or an Abrams tank. Anything to stop him being at the controls – that's to say at the mercy – of himself.

That shrewd if not always linguistically elegant philosopher of male sexuality, Cynthia Payne, reflected famously on the very subject we're addressing. "If a man is not de-spunked regularly, he's just a bleedin' nuisance." There aren't sufficient brothels in Streatham to deactivate the number of young males presently spunking up the streets, but drain them down we must if we are to move about our cities safely. So for them it's reading, army, crochet work, ping-pong or prison. And for us it's an end to idealising the condition of disinheritance and bestiality we call youth culture.

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