Why People Choose a Life of Crime - Essay Example

From this discussion it is clear that the fewer the resources a community possesses to construct infrastructure, the more likely it is for vandalism to thrive in the vacant, burned out, and neglected  houses in that community. Suburbs have a large percentage of people living under the poverty level as indicated by a national census report in 2009. Unemployment is another issue that induces criminal activity in people. Many of the minority groups in the United States lack proper jobs, which explains why there is a large number of African-American and Latin-American youth incarcerated by the state and national governments.

Poor and unemployed people resort to criminal lives because pilfering and theft offer a temporary solution to financial and economic difficulty.This study highlights that strain theory is one of the most common psychological theory of crime. The ideology behind the Strain theory is that an individual covets something (like a material object or lifestyle) but they have no means of ever getting that object or living that lifestyle in the near future. The rational choice theory is closely related to the strain theory because it involves a struggle to survive under the existing conditions.

Consequently, an individual weighs up the marginal cost of committing crime, versus the marginal benefit of committing crime to save or achieve something. If the marginal benefit is higher, they end up committing crimes such as dealing drugs, avoiding tram fare, misrepresentation of funds, shop-lifting and so forth.