Poverty does not cause crime...Criminals do!
Most folks know that liberals have always linked poverty with crime. These same folks with common sense already knew that the reason for poverty is due to liberal policies. So, what causes people to commit crimes if it isn’t poverty?
Heather Mac Donald, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, is asking questions about this liberal myth. If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?
The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.
The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.
The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.
The Cloward mentioned above is the same Cloward that developed the Cloward-Piven strategy . Cloward & Piven wanted to force political change through orchestrated crisis. Doesn’t that sound like the same strategy Obama is using now?
Mac Donald points out several time-lines that defeat the liberal claims that poverty causes crime…
The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis. The academy’s commitment to root causes apologetics nevertheless persisted. Andrew Karmen of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice echoed Cloward and Ohlin in 2000 in his book “New York Murder Mystery.” Crime, he wrote, is “a distorted form of social protest.” And as the current recession deepened, liberal media outlets called for more government social programs to fight the coming crime wave. In late 2008, the New York Times urged President Barack Obama to crank up federal spending on after-school programs, social workers, and summer jobs. “The economic crisis,” the paper’s editorialists wrote, “has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs—among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities.”
Even then crime patterns were defying expectations. And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.
Why did liberals, like Cloward, want to push the myth that poverty causes crime? It was an excuse to redistribute the wealth to the unproductive in society. Liberals always attempt to place blame except where blame is due. The individual is responsible for their actions, not society. Liberal parents also share the majority of the blame. Poverty was just an easy scapegoat.
Not to Liberals: Poverty doesn’t cause crime…Criminals do! There are several reasons to why crime rates are lower. The increased sales of guns since Obama was elected is a major crime deterrent. Second reason is that when you keep criminals in prison, they’re not on the streets committing crimes against the productive folks in society. I know you liberals hate facts but the proof can be found in the stats.
Thanks for the post. Put his claims on the pile of campaign promises for transparency.
hey, this is useful to me because im doing an essay about whether poverty causes crime and i would be interested to know where you got you statistics from so i can refer to them in my essay. it would be much appreciated if you could let me know.
hi I’m also doing an essay about it. I need to have references which direct how I can conclude.
The stats exist and suggest a strong correlation between the poverty and crime rate…On Average, for every one percentage point increase in the poverty rate there is an increase in the crime rate by 52 incidents (per 100,000) people, ceteris paribus. A high t-ratio and p-value of less than .001 would suggest that not only is this finding statistically, but also substantively, significant at both the .10 and .05 levels.
These data come from the Statisitcal Abstract of the United States (US Census Bureau) and were diagnosed using simple OLS regression.
Crime rates are lower while poverty rates are at record levels. 2010 Census stats prove this.
That says very little about an overall trend. Obviously poverty is not the only factor that causes crime. But the fact is that poorer areas, poorer nations have higher crime rates. Linking correlation with causation here is more difficult but there are those in the social sciences out there doing this.
And frankly this article is fucking trash anyway, and not just because I disagree with it. I can’t imagine myself writing something like this swapping liberal for conservative. The idea that “Liberal policies” cause poverty is mind numbing. Most “Liberals” you speak of would probably love to live somewhere like Sweden, which has a lot less poverty than the US. This tends to be true of left leaning countries in general, and no amount of quips about how liberals supposedly don’t like facts will change this.
Yes, I can link the liberal vs conservative political situation with this. The areas of the US with the highest crime/poverty rates tend to be those cities controlled by liberal politicians: New York,Detroit, Washington DC, Oakland, Richmond…just to name a few. I can’t imagine someone being so ignorant to not realize facts. Liberal policies do cause poverty because liberals believe in keeping people in poverty. Don’t believe me? Research what cities have the highest poverty rate and guess what one will find? Yes, liberal controlled cities have higher poverty rates. I wonder why this happens? Think liberal policies have anything to do with it moron?
When people lost their jobs in 2008 & 2009 they sat home on their unemployment watching their children whom otherwise would be skipping school to committ crimes. With the parents unemployed the children can’t even skip out on summer school. We didn’t have crime back in the early 1960′s because women stayed home to govern the children.There was no drug parties in the home while the mother was present. Drugs cost money so children steal to buy them, hinge crime goes up.
This is the liberal failure fact. If it takes 27 tax payers to pay one government worker how many private sector jobs are lost? 26? This is the downward spiral liberals cause. You may think you are helping people but in fact you are helping people out of working for a living. There is a time space where people dont have the time to commit crime when they are at work. This is robbed by the liberals.
Crime Rate in Australia, UK Worst In the World! highest taxes.
Northern Ireland has some of the lowest crime rates. lowest taxes.Why do low taxes create less crimes because their are more jobs.
Why do higher taxes create more crime? Thats easy, because there are less jobs.
To think somehow that expanding government jobs is a gift to the people is not mathmaticly possible. The fact is the higher the taxes the less jobs there are to back these taxes.
[...] Guns and poverty, but no crime. Well, enough of my anecdotal observations. Let’s turn to something more scholarly (via Scotty Starnes). [...]
[...] As we know, it’s very easy to defeat liberal myths with actual facts. For decades, Democrats have blamed society, and even poverty, for violent crimes. Facts have defeated the claim that poverty causes crime. We have more unemployed Americans living in poverty under Obama while at the same time having more Americans owning/purchasing firearms. Guess what? Crime rates are lower. [...]
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