the main problem with the "would jason have been a criminal without bruce" debate is that it fails to engage with the concept of criminality in anything but the most persecutory, classist ways possible.
jason was already a criminal when bruce found him. stealing tires to survive is a crime. jason is in poverty. he doesn't have the luxury to pick & choose his victims so that they're all rich & tough like batman – bruce catches him jacking the tires of a working class guy who's just in the neighborhood to check on his aunt. (suits were coded working class in this era of Batman; jason's father is also depicted in a white collar. yes that's its own form of classism lol) Batman #408:
bruce comes across this guy directly after stopping a violent mugging. i want to emphasize that jason is contributing to the lack of safety in his neighborhood even if that's not really what he wants to be doing. again, he does not have the luxury to follow this guy around and ensure he isn't harmed as a result of his actions. he does not have the luxury to make sure the guy can even afford to replace those tires. this is a fairly realistic depiction of interactions between poverty & crime.
the insistence that jason would NOT have been a criminal erases his poverty and helplessness. jason's squat is full of collected tin cans - he is literally scrounging for pennies to survive. he is visibly scrawny and underfed. even though he only stole 2 tires from bruce, we see 5 in his squat, suggesting he may struggle to hock tires even when he can get them.
his lifestyle is not working out. he's a 5th grade dropout who refuses to seek help. (i would argue that jason's refusal to be a "charity case" arises from Max Allen Collins's uncritical consumption of Reaganite anti-welfare propaganda, but it works in the story because there are a contingent of impoverished people, particularly men, who believe it humiliating to "rely on the government" because they, too, have uncritically consumed such propaganda and tied it to their masculine identity, so much so they'd rather turn to crime. it's entirely possible for Willis Todd to have been such a man & passed his beliefs onto Jason.) jason's tire theft is very clearly a first step down the same path willis took, "boosting cars and working in chop shops"
batman occupies a precarious legal position, but he is not framed as a criminal. there have been times where he was hunted by cops, but they have always been a departure from the status quo. he works with law enforcement. his vigilantism is better understood as a privately funded extension of the state than an opposition to it. when DC writers claim that bruce pulled jason out of a life of crime, they are not counting batman's vigilantism as criminal activity because of its compliance with existing power structures. but jason's version of heroism never involved those structures.
(take note: batman called the cops here where jason didn't)
jason's vigilantism as red hood is framed as criminality because it does not seek permission from the state. (no, it's not because he kills. cops kill. it's not because he uses explosives; batman uses explosives.)
ofc, DC writers that claim jason would've turned to crime without batman are blatantly ignoring that jason died young and became a full-blown crimelord as a result of bruce's influence, but that's another discussion.
the opposition to these writers' claims has an unfortunate tendency to cede 99% of the fight: "jason wouldn't be a criminal! he's a good person." we need not accept DC's classist framework that criminality can be defined as pointless immoral behavior, instead of marginalization by the state—potentially for good (predatory behavior) &/or bad (poor, nonwhite, etc) reasons.
and this also doesn't mean that jason would never have lapsed into actually immoral behavior. at the end of the day, what we're struggling with is the refusal to imagine that people can be spiritually worn down by their experiences and give up on notions of good and evil in the face of unforgiving practicality. it's a failure of empathy.
so yes, jason was a criminal. he would have continued to be a criminal, at least so long as he refused help. bruce's intervention in his life was a way of getting a very driven little boy to accept that help. (it's also rooted in Collins's classist notion that it's fine to endanger little boys if they come from rough backgrounds, but Collins was not Starlin and never intended for Jason to be killed.) i'm tired of pretending otherwise. rather, it's more enlightening to think about what kind of criminal jason might've been: a worn-out addict? an opportunistic thief? a catlad type? maybe even a noble gangster or a radicalized anti-prison ex-con. we can have plenty of versions of a criminal jason who's still sympathetic, still heroic, still good.
in the timeless words of Eugene V Debs:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
