and yes i realize Draugnar and Hellalt agreeing would be a very rare thing.

:D I think it is pretty obvious. If you haven't already, you might want to look at crime levels in poorer cities. (Detroit and Buffalo come to mind).

any geographical area would be fine. i'v looked at LA most

I am pretty sure there is dual causality. Crime causes poverty, and poverty can lead to crime. However, I would also argue that culture (localized culture, not national culture) leads to both (and is in a lot of ways more important).

well are there any cultures you could think of where this might not be in effect.

Not terribly true. The poorest places in the US have relatively low crime rates. The crime rate has actually declined during the recession. And it isn't really even economic disparity since NYC and SF have the most unequal societies and have reasonably low crime rates. The primary correlation you're going to find is racial, which is unpleasant to talk about in the US. Last time I checked, the highest crime rates were either very black cities (Memphis, Gary, DC, Baltimore) or speed bump towns near the Mexican border, but not on it (Tucson, Corpus Christi).

If you want to read stuff, I'd suggest the City Journal.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/cj_adv_search.html?cx=010085638868707497598%3Acmoasvt_j1u&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=UTF-8&q=crime+and+poverty#1017

thats what i'v been seeing. but would we be able to connect the racial crime with poverty because of different cultures? if not what would it be.

"About 10.4% of the entire African-American male population in the United States aged 25 to 29 was incarcerated, by far the largest racial or ethnic group—by comparison, 2.4% of Hispanic men and 1.2% of white men in that same age group were incarcerated. According to a report by the Justice Policy Institute in 2002, the number of black men in prison has grown to five times the rate it was twenty years ago. Today, more African-American men are in jail than in college. In 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college."

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0881455.html

I'm sure that some of that has to do with Blacks (what is the current PC term?) living in poorer areas, but there also has to be some cultural connection.

The have-nots will steal from the haves. Not all of them, not even most of them, but some of them will give in to temptation.

For some that is caused by envy. They have it. I want it. I'll take it.

For some of them it's their *need* to support their habit (a very powerful motivator).

For some, it isn't greed that drives them, it's necessity. If your children are starving you will do *anything* to feed them, anything at all - including selling your body or stealing from your weaker neighbours (Your essay needs to note that prostitution and theft/low level crime, go hand in hand with poverty).

Stealing from each other makes poverty worse. The poor can't afford good door locks or window locks (or insurance) but the rich can. So the thieves steal from the easy target, the poor. That makes the poor poorer and doesn't bother the rich at all.

If you haven't already, then read "Les Miserable" (the original book, not the abridged book of the play). Then read up on the Irish Potato Famine. See how the have-very-little (police, army, paid thugs) seriously oppressed the have-nots (peasants).

Hispanics are poorer in the US than are Blacks in general though. And the poorest areas of the US are not terribly Black. I believe the South Bronx is the poorest Congressional District and the poorest counties are on the Great Plains (Western Kansas and Nebraska). Not a huge amount of crime there compared to say Baltimore, DC and Memphis.

Why would a thief steal form the poor? Why would they be an easy target? Poor to me means nothing worth stealing.

I forget the exact number, but Madoff stole something equivalent to like 20 years of property crime in the US. Every home break in, mugging and car theft in the US for many years.

what about gangs and the black market.

I think it has more to do with a disconnection between individuals and a society. Add to that a lack of employment opportunities, inequality and the promotion of materialism and consumption in the media and you have high property crime rates. Thats why in tight poor rural communities you might have a low rate of crime but with the same level of low per capital income in a city, without the sense of community, the crime rate would be much higher. I also feel that discrimination has a part to play- if society treats you like shit, doesnt offer you employment, doesnt allow you into their society then why should you play by their rules? that is why sometimes new migrants to a country will form criminal groups, But as time goes by and that migrant group learns the new countries language and culture, as the mainstream culture group accepts the new group the crime rates within that group should fall.

It depends on what you define crime. For instance, do you call the bonus of bankers crime?

And do you want to make the relation to the number of crimes committed or the amount of money?

If you take the 50 billion of Madoff, then you need a lot of stealing black people to come to the same amount of money.

Regards,

Lucas

One should also look at crime rates over time, types of locations, such as urban, rural, suburban, and proportion of the pop in each over time. The average age of the population, male to female ratio over time, are also an important factors. Only when you take into account these and other factors can you be sure that what your seeing is crime rate affected only by the poverty rate. You might find it interesting that during the Great Depression the crime rate was very low, and during prohibition a very large percent of crimes were related to bootleging of ethanol. Personaly I think poverty alone does not cause crime but many other factors mixed with it will, such as a lack of closeness in families, and an indifference by neighbors.

bump

I assisted with a Geography professor's book in college which studies areas of Akron, OH, where the Major Crimes (FBI Part1), where the victim lived, and where the offender lived. He found areas that were crime magnets (pulled in both victims and offenders) but also poor areas that exported crime (criminal left the area in search of victims) and crime import areas (which were richer but had an influx of criminals from other areas. Interesting book---THE SPATIAL DYNAMICS OF CRIME.

It all depends on how you define crime and which crimes you consider the most important. The number of people willing to be prostitutes will indeed increase in a harsh economic climate as the number of alternative ways of generating money for the poorest dwindles. It is worth highlighting the perhaps obvious fact that this has no effect whatsoever on the crime rates in countries where prostitution is legal. In countries where it is illegal crime rates go up, but the harm done by this crime on society is pretty small.

Before the latest recession, of course, governments had plenty of money to spend on all kinds of interesting ideas that in times of a harsh recession would be impossible. One of these interesting ideas was an illegal war in Iraq. This crime (and I feel I should say at this point that, like with prostitution, there are a great many people who believe it isn't a crime at all) directly resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

They are of course just two examples and not a huge amount can be drawn from them, but they do highlight the fact that poverty changes the sorts of crime being committed and the sorts of people who become criminals. Whether it increases the number of crimes being is less clear, but in all probability it will. Whether the impact done by crime also increases is much harder to judge.

bump. i'm writing it right now.