Link between Poverty and Crime - Essay Example

Poverty and Crime Introduction There are several studies that link crime and poverty. An anonymous poet wrote about crime in 18th century as follows:"The law will punish a man or woman who steals the goose from the hillside, but lets the greater robber loose who steals the hillside from the goose."(Muntaquin, 1996) In fact in history there are several reasons mentioned by various researchers linking crime to various aspects of life. Some link it to poverty, some link crime to increased urbanization, racism, and many others link it to globalization. Unfortunately, till date it was not been able to put them under one profile describing criminal acts in our society and in addition there is also no single set of situations that can be shown to lead to a person committing a crime. Today, in many parts of the world it has almost become an accepted truth that poverty is one of the fundamental causes of crimes happening. The suspicion that poverty triggers has come from a very lone time there is a lack of proper evidence to support this statement. If we look at the statistics, it can be noted that half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day (Shah, 1998). In other words, majority of the world’s population live below the poverty line. Does this mean to say that majority of the worlds population is committing crime? No. If that was the case then it would become impossible even for a single person to survive peacefully. This paper discusses various aspects of poverty and crime and also presents in the views of various researchers in the literature review. Emile Durkheim explains that crime is normal and necessary social behavior. The unavoidability of crime is connected to the differences or the heterogeneity within a society. Since each and ever person is so different from another and use a variety of methods and forms of behavior to meet their needs, it is not amazing that some will resort to criminality. Hence he suggest that as long as this basic human differences exist, crime is unavoidable and one of the fundamental conditions of social life (Muntaquin, 1996). If we define poverty it can be said that it is a condition in which a person or community is deprived of, and or lacks the essentials for a minimum standard of well-being and life. However this does not mean that in order to accuire these necessities of life, people committ crime, and if that was the case then there would have been no one who will be above the poverty line if poverty is the state for the majority of the world’s people and nations. As we all know that inequality in the world is increasing day by day. It in not surprising that even the wealthiest nation has the largest gap between rich people and poor people compared to other developed nations. Poverty is not just an economic issue, but it is also an issue of political economics (Shah, 1998). When we talk about crime it refers to the accompanying social stigma are generally reserved for those activities that are harmful to life and property and injurious to the general population or a community itself. It also includes crimes that cause serious loss or damage to individuals. Crime is generally classified into categories, including violent crime, property crime, and public order crime (Wikipedia, 2007). There are many reasons and theories proposed by different researchers as to what causes crime in society. Some of them attribute crime as a biological response, and others explain that crime to be psychological. However, in reality crime is believed to be a mixture of all these psychological, sociological and biological aspects. Furthermore, when it comes to the sociological aspects of crime it is really strong.  For instance, many especially the children and teenagers commit crimes basically under the influence of pressure from their peer group.  Poverty is also sometimes clamed as a forcing factor for committing crime. In fact when these teenagers and children find that they are lacking behind in certain material things in their life when compared to their friends, they chose crime as an easy way to come up to the level of their friends especially in the material aspect. Similarly this kind of attitude can also be seen in adults. They are also influenced or pressurized by the society and other to fall into the trap of crime. And once a person gets into the habit of committing crime, it becomes highly difficult to change them (webpages.marshall.edu, N.D.). There are several researchers who blame urbanization for increasing crime rates. They say that urbanity is the key factor responsible for property crime. In addition, they link urbanity and population density to violent crime, and poverty, broken marriages, divorce and increasing incidences of homicide. Statistics also support the fact that poverty and divorce continue to be the main determinants of homicide especially in rural communities. On the other hand population mobility and urbanity remain the strongest factors in both rural violent and property crime. There are also factors such as unemployment that play a strong role in rural property related crimes (Kposowa, et al 1995). On the positive side of urbanization is that cities encourage innovation, production, and trade which is responsible for the improvement of the standard of living. Urbanization also can provide consumers with a lot of goods and services which is almost impossible for a rural community to enjoy. However the negative part of the story is that urbanization has also brought in a lot of social and economic problems especially for the urban middle class and people below the poverty line. This in turn has resulted in problems have affected the pattern of outward migration called “suburbanization”. Conventionally in the urban cities in the U.S have been experiencing high crime rates. The increasing rate of suburbanization has caused declining the quality of life in the suburban areas. This difference has triggered the overall crime rates in cities with populations over 250,000 in the year 2002 are about two times higher than suburban regions and three times higher than rural counties1.There are also statistics that indicates that huge Metropolitan areas record high crime rates which is much more than urban cities. Studies conducted by Park and Jargowsky (2006) provide enough evidence that the relation between suburbanization and crime seems to be more evident in the property related crime case than in the violent crime. This study supports an argument that there is positive relationship between suburbanization and metropolitan crime. In addition they also claim that this positive effect is mainly due to the frustration and hostility originated with poor ecological environments such as bad neighborhood, inequality, racial or income segregation (Park and Jargowsky, 2006). In other word they have linked it mainly to poverty and the low standard of living. In another study by Farley (1987) it was shown that there exist an unsolved part of the relationship between suburbanization and central-city crime. This relates to the arbitrary product of the effect of the city-suburb boundary location on the denominator of the crime rate. In this study it was demonstrated that such an effect is bound to occur even if the offenders do not move between suburb and city. The prime reason for this according to the researchers is the effect of the boundary position on the denominator, given that most crime occurs in the central part of the urban area. In fact the measures of poverty, relative deprivation and racial composition, was also taken into consideration and these accounted for only part of the reason that crime rates are high in the central city and thus correlated with suburbanization. This study also reported that metropolitan population positively correlated with suburbanization, also accounts for part of the relationship between suburbanization and central city crime rates (Farley, 1987). Racial discrimination was another reason pointed out by many researchers as a major reason for the proliferation of crime rates. In a report by New Century Foundation (1999) the following statistics was brought out: It was estimated by them that there is more black-on-white than black-on-black violent crime. According to their analysis of the approximately 1,700,000 interracial crimes of violence involving blacks and whites, 90 percent are committed by blacks against whites. Hence they said that blacks are up to 250 times more probable to do criminal acts against whites than the reverse. They also estimated that blacks commit violent crimes at four to eight times the white rate. Hispanics commit crime about three times the white rate and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate. When they analyzed the percentage of people heat crime it was found that blacks are two times as likely as whites to commit hate crimes. Hispanics are a hate crime victim category but not a perpetrator category. Hispanic criminals are classified as whites, which inflates the white offense rate and gives the impression that Hispanics commit no hate crimes. The study also stated that blacks are as much more dangerous than whites as men are more dangerous than women. Poverty is the strongest determinant of crimes such as homicide. In the same way, urbanization and population density are strongly related to violent crime. Besides, in the case of property crime, urbanity and population density are once again play a significant role. Similar results that relate crime with race are obtained with samples of Hispanic and Native American counties. Hence this study concluded that the factors that explain crime in areas in which these groups are highly represented are the same factors that explain crime elsewhere. Besides, race and ethnic related views of crime does not hold much importance and that the subculture of violence theory as applied to blacks in particular is not of much significance (Kposowa, et al 1995). Studies conducted by Liska et al (1998) pointed at the fact that the relationship between violent crime and the racial composition of suburban communities reflects both the effect of racial composition on violent crime and the effect of violent crime especially robbery on racial composition. In fact they found that the effect of the robbery rate on racial composition is to some extent stronger than the effect of racial composition on the violent crime rate. The general belief that change in racial composition is an indication of sharp increases in crime is accurate, but its truth is partly based on restricted residential choices for nonwhites-a restriction that the belief is used to justify. Possibly a more philosophical implication for criminology is that more than anything else crime has important impacts on communities. Remarkably, theories of social disorganization or subcultures of violence have taken communities to be significant only in the promotion or control of crime, which is a vision restricted to one-way effects. The community is treated as external or an exogenous agent-rather than as a collective actor for whom quality of life and locational choices are exaggerated by crime. Further this study pointed out at the interesting fact that there is an opportunity to pursue not only the theoretical causes but also the consequences of crime, not only for individuals but for communities also. There are studies that reveled the fact that the welfare programs have a greater role to play. The results of studies conducted by Hannon and Defronzo (1998) suggest that higher levels of welfare assistance reduce the strength of the positive relationship between the size of the disadvantaged population and crime rates. The findings are in line with the notion derived from traditional anomielstrain theory which states that welfare allows recipients to legally obtain culturally defined goals, as a result reduce criminogenic frustration. The results also put forward support for Messner and Rosenfelds (1997) argument that welfare frees people from total dependence on market forces, thus off-putting anomie and enhancing the social control functions of non-economic institutions. There are also studies that point out that crime induces poverty. According to a study by Mehlum et al (2004) linked poverty with crime and stated that poverty makes thieves and thieves get in the way of economic growth. In fact they also linked it to job and said that ob creation has two effects. The first one is that higher labor demand tends to decrease crime and the second is that higher output in terms of income and material goods gives more to steal, tending to increase crime. In case of low levels of modernization the second effect dominates and, as a result, the model has decreasing returns to scale. On the other hand at higher levels of modernization there is increasing returns to scale due to declining crime. The economy may either end up in a poverty trap with high crime and low production or obtain full modernization with low crime rates. Hence they concluded that the danger of ending up in a poverty trap has implications for economic policies. In conclusion, it can be poverty does have a link to crime rates but it is not the sole reason for crime in the society. As mentioned earlier there are various other reasons such as urbanization, racial differences, unemployment, globalization etc. In addition crime is also linked to the increasing incidences of drug and alcohol abuse, mental disturbances, emotional stress and lack of education. Hence though all these conditions may be linked to poverty it does not justify the fact that it is the sole reason for increasing crime in the world. References Farley, J.E. (1987) Suburbanization and Central-City Crime Rates: New Evidence and a Reinterpretation, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 93, No. 3. (Nov., 1987), pp. 688-700. Hannon, L. and Defronzo, J. (1998) The Truly Disadvantaged, Public Assistance, and Crime, Social Problems, Vol. 45, No. 3. (Aug., 1998), pp. 383-392. Kposowa, A.J., Breault, B.D. and Harrison, B.M. (1995) Reassessing the Structural Covariates of Violent and Property Crimes in the USA: A County Level Analysis, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 46, No. 1. (Mar., 1995), pp. 79-105. Liska, A.E., Logan, J.R. and Bellair, P.E. (1998) Race and Violent Crime in the Suburbs, American Sociological Review, Vol. 63, No. 1. (Feb., 1998), pp. 27-38. Mehlum, H., Moene, K. and Torvik, R. (2004) Crime Induced Poverty Traps, Retrieved 25 April 2007 from http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iso/Ragnar.Torvik/jderev09.pdf Messner, S. F., and Rosenfeld, R. (1997) Crime and the American Dream. Belmont, California: Wadsworth. Muntaquin, J.A. (1996) Criminalization of Poverty in Capitalist America, In: Schooling the Generations in the Politics of Prisons, ed. Chinosole, Berkeley, CA: New Earth Publications. Retrieved 25 April 2007 from http://www.prisonactivist.org/pubs/jalil-crim-pov.html New Century Foundation (1999) The color of Crime: Race, Crime and Violence in America Retrieved 25 April 2007 from http://www.amren.com/color.pdf Park, Y. and Jargowsky, P.A. (2006) The Relationship between Suburbanization and Crime in U.S Metropolitan Areas: Cross-Sectional Analysis for the year of 2000, Retrieved 25 April 2007 from http://www.utdallas.edu/~yhpark/papers/editing_version.pdf Shah, A. (1998) Causes of Poverty- Global Issues. Retrieved 25 April 2007 from http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Poverty.asp webpages.marshall.edu, (N.D.) There are many reasons and theories as to what causes crime in society….. Retrieved 25 April 2007 from http://webpages.marshall.edu/~brunty11/index2essays.htm Wikipedia, (2007) Crime, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., Retrieved 25 April 2007 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime Read More