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Just look at the 1920s, says David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at John Jay College of Criminal Studies.
"It was a period of booming economic prosperity, the roaring '20s, and very high crime," he says...
I really disagree with that. The main reason lower income areas of any town look so bad and the crime is so high is due to poverty issues. I agree that it is also a break down of morals, but often times the need to survive at some level will over-ride the morals a person may have been taught during their childhood.
Poverty doesn't excuse crime.....but I think it is a root cause in most circumstances.
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Originally Posted by GloryB
I really disagree with that. The main reason lower income areas of any town look so bad and the crime is so high is due to poverty issues. I agree that it is also a break down of morals, but often times the need to survive at some level will over-ride the morals a person may have been taught during their childhood.
Poverty doesn't excuse crime.....but I think it is a root cause in most circumstances.
It is a contribution but ultimately, crime is due to breakdown in morals. If you have a solid moral foundation, you would not be out there committing crimes despite being in poverty.
Crime is a complex phenonmenon. There are a bunch of "predictors" of crime - which is to say, you could feed data about a community into a computer, and have the computer predict that area's crime rate to within a fair level of accuracy. Those predictors include things like the number of young males aged 15 to 34, income stratification, fatherlessness rates, average lead exposure, income mobility, average income, and other demographic factors.
In general, cohesive societies have low crime, while stratified or non-cohesive ones have more. We even see this internationally, e.g., Japan has a murder rate about 10 times lower than the US, while the US rate is about 3.5 times lower than Mexico's rate.
It is a contribution but ultimately, crime is due to breakdown in morals. If you have a solid moral foundation, you would not be out there committing crimes despite being in poverty.
I disagree.
If I were poor and starving, and I had a child who was starving, too, I'd have no reservations about walking into a store and stealing food to feed him/her...
~Mike (is only human and hopes he never finds himself in this position...)
I have to agree with MsConnie here that poverty is only one contribution to crime, but I don't believe it's the sole or root cause of it. That's why there are still many who'd rather work 2-3 jobs to feed their family than turn to crime. Despite the economic downturn, there are still jobs available if you really want to work hard enough or are willing to look beyond what you're used to do. It's the ones who like instant gratifications who tend to take the shortcut that crimes offer.
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