Juress Kika, one of the three men who stabbed schoolboy Ben Kinsella, was recorded secretly in a police van describing the murder. "See when it happened, yeah. Like boom. It was like a kinda quick ting. Like Boom. Went down the road, come back up. Boom, boom. Finished. Boom. Ghost. You get what I'm saying?"

Somewhere here is the unconscious acknowledgement of the ease with which Ben's life was snuffed out. No expression of guilt; not the slightest sense of regret or responsibility; but an admission in the word "boom" and the word "madness", used earlier, that a boy had passed from life to death in a flash. Boom. Ghost indeed.

No parent of a boy or young man can read this exchange without experiencing a chill; for the coded street patois of Kika, Jade Braithwaite and Michael Alleyne, who, incidentally, should have received longer sentences than life with minimum terms of 19 years, reveals a near total lack of empathetic imagination. "They have," said Detective Chief Inspector John Macdonald after the verdicts were brought in, "no social abilities whatsoever to interact with people."

This is the problem. Young men so completely ill-equipped to express themselves, to register the feelings and lives of others, become, by default, sociopathic, a danger to everyone, not because of any innate evil, but the simple failure of parents and society to instil in them self-control and an understanding that violence is wrong, particularly this pursuit of a young man who had done nothing to them and who was, as his parents always advised, walking away from the incident. Kika's "boom" is blood lust, the babble in the head of someone who has never had a coherent conversation. It is skunk-fuelled paranoia and a low self-esteem that demands respect. "Boom" is the morbid lingo of gang culture.

Despite the tragedy of Ben Kinsella's murder last year in north London and the many deaths of young people from stabbing, it is important to recognise crime is in fact down in England and Wales and has been on a downward path since 1995. The latest figures show that the number of the most serious violent crimes is down by 12% and knife crime is down 16% in the metropolitan area. The risk of being a victim of crime is, astonishingly, at its lowest level since the British Crime Survey was begun in 1981. But when we read about Ben, we have a totally different impression, which is why six out of 10 of us are convinced that crime is rising.

We need to refine our thinking about crimes like Ben's murder and see where they come from, rather than imagining that we're all going to hell in a handcart.

In general, the crime story is encouraging: if the government was not so conflicted by its mission to keep crime and the fear of crime at the front of the news agenda, it would be able to boast about the continuing reduction. Labour set out with a clear enough strategy, where the criminal justice system was used to bring about a more ordered society; more offences were dealt with by formal sanction; court procedures were speeded up and greater numbers were jailed - the prison population has risen by 30% under Labour.

But this is not the whole picture. An independent audit of criminal justice under Labour by Enver Solomon and others in 2007 suggested that the government was "placing too much emphasis on finding criminal justice solutions to complex social and economic problems" and they pointedly asked whether the government should be clearer about the limitations of its approach.

Which brings us to the causes of crime among young men. More than one in 10 males aged 16-24 are likely to be victims of crime, while the majority of violent offences are committed by the same age group. A key factor is alcohol, but another is the steady rise of chaotic violence, paranoia, drug dealing and drug use, in other words, the gang culture that spawned Ben Kinsella's killers.

The police estimate that there are about 170 gangs in London and an equal number in Strathclyde. There may be thousands in Britain - no one can say. What we do know is that they have a dreadful power to disrupt communities and skew crime figures. When 11 members of the Gooch gang in Manchester were given heavy prison sentences, including 39 and 35 years for the killers Colin Joyce and Lee Amos, the police revealed that gang-related violence went down 92% in the city.

In London, the police were clearly after something of the same effect last week when they arrested 259 people in raids across the capital and seized drugs, weapons, money and dangerous dogs. Though welcome, this is probably no more effective than the raids seen in The Wire TV series, which shows the ingrained gang culture of Baltimore as having an almost bacterial vigour. Where government has failed is in the understanding of this gang culture, or at least in an intelligent reaction to the gangs, which may now include more than 20,000 young men (98% of gang members are male) and which are responsible for a vast proportion of drugs offences, theft and random violence.

This is, indeed, "a complex social and economic problem", yet there is really no mystery about gangs. All the research is available in the government's Tackling Gangs programme and in an exhaustive report, "Dying to Belong", from Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice.

We know that gangs form rapidly in inner-city areas, that the wealth gap is important, that the sale of drugs delineates territories as much as a feeling of local honour. We know that very young boys are recruited because they are less likely to be caught and in exchange they are offered protection as well as a sense of belonging and self-worth that may not be available at home. We know that many join because they have to, that they are soon lost to the gang mentality and end up with a chaotic, violent loop playing in their head, just like Kika.

To react to this problem with raids is not enough. And to throw money blindly at it in the hope of alleviating the sense of grievance on some of Britain's estates doesn't work either. The approach has to be better targeted if we are to get into the mind of an individual like Kika early on. First, the gangs need to be decapitated, the main players pursued and arrested before the sort of mayhem created by the Gooch gang is allowed to become established.

Then you move lower down the hierarchy with policies of intervention and prevention and begin to address the lack of security on the streets, the absence of structure and good role models at home and the failure to understand that the currency of respect is consideration, not fear. We need to spend much more on finding activities for these young men and supplementing the social skills that they do not learn at home or at an infrequently attended school.

That leaves drugs and here I think we have to dare to think about decriminalisation and how that may shrivel the criminality that accompanies every level of the drug trade. I admit that this is probably a step too far for my friends at the Daily Mail, but we need to apply our intelligence to these problems in a way that we haven't before. Labour's approach to criminal justice had results of a sort, but it was a narrow and punitive policy which did nothing to prevent the senseless murder of Ben Kinsella. The knives are still out there and so is the babble.