Depending on your religious persuasion, poverty has been with us since the Old Testament with the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to struggle and toil in the soil to survive and with the first recorded crime (biblically) when Cain murdered Able. Pride and jealousy were the first motivations for that crime.
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 (RSV)
1:9 What exists now 1 is what will be, 2 and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing truly new on earth. 3 1:10 Is there anything about which someone can say, “Look at this! It is new!”? 4 It was already 5 done long ago, 6 before our time. 7
This refers to actions and behaviors of human beings; there is nothing new under the sun..
Poverty alone does not produce crime. Poverty can cause the psychological stresses motivating people to criminal behavior. There are millions in poverty and most do not commit crimes.
Crime is committed by those who become desperate, frustrated, and angry at systems that ignore or deny the basics for survival and respond negatively to those feelings (Bolland, 2003). Worse, they feel hopeless and have nothing to lose by resorting to crime.
Jealousy results from those who desire what others have and combined with hopelessness, frustration and desperation will result in ant-social behavior and criminal behavior.
The sum of these feelings is anger, even rage-rage at those who have much as the source of their frustration. Youth is particularly susceptible to these summed feelings converting those feelings to anger, bias, and hatred. These feelings severe enough can also produce substance abuse, depression, and suicide (Bolland et al., 2001).
Institutions perpetuating poverty…capitalism as an institution while not designed to impoverish; it does through the manipulations of criminal investors and investment institutions to produce illegal or immoral profits through convoluted transactions that produce nothing but paper.
It has become a complicated lottery that; when fails, begs for corporate welfare at the tax payers’ expense. Retirements are wiped out. People living off these investments fall into or near poverty and must return to work, if possible, to survive. The failures of Enron, AIG, the major banks, Lehman Brothers are just a few whose failures improvised people.
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE57G5KN20090817
http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2009/Feb/25/SEC_%27faces_questions%27_over_Lehman_Brothers_insider_trading.html
Crime born of poverty is not exclusive to the urban or rural poor. Crime from poverty happens from all races. People from all levels of society commit a crime with all sorts of justifications. Crimes have caused poverty as well as crime being born of poverty.
Financial and corporate institutional crime perpetuates and aggravates poverty by reducing or eroding funds otherwise available to assist in lifting people out of poverty and relieving hopelessness.
Bank’s blacklisting low-income neighborhoods as hi-risk makes it more difficult to get financing before assessing the individual. This is another action that perpetuates poverty and reinforcing that sense of hopelessness and racism. It becomes acceptable to some to see banks robbed.
Medical institutional members wittingly or unwittingly perpetuate poverty by giving sub-standard care because the patient has no insurance or the care-giver has a personal bias against the poor and minorities.
Those in poverty routinely are not given comprehensive diagnosis and usually are simply prescribed something in the hope that it “fixes” the problem. They are not given thorough examinations and testing as a Caucasian with money or insurance might receive. (LaVeist, Nickerson, & Bowie 1995)
Governments perpetuate poverty by under-funding urban or inner-city school.
Continual stereotyping by the news media, politicians, and from within the communities against themselves all contribute to sustaining poverty and attributing criminal behavior.
Politicians and pundit insist that particular races are prone to committing certain crimes. Political conservatism contributes to poverty by demeaning the dignity of those groups the politician’s railing against with distorted generalizations and fear mongering to gain votes. With that support, they work to cut the floor out from under the impoverished.
Talk-show hosts and other commentators routinely suggest that reducing poverty in minority neighborhoods would be ineffectual, implying that the residents are just naturally inclined to violence. These comments are always unsupported by verifiable, reliable data and are directed to select ideological fans (the likes of Glen Beck, Bill O’Rilley, Rush Limbaugh).
Welfare has not been a contributor to poverty. On the contrary, it has at least set a floor a person or family could not fall further and helps people maintain some level of dignity.
One problem with the system occurs when a state funding is so low that the welfare recipients are deliberately kept below the poverty level. The unstable and ever changing administration of welfare has caused some to remain in poverty.
Referring to welfare-to-work programs; job training one year, cut or reduced the next, food stamp funding reduced, changed or modified with the political winds are examples of the instability people must live with. (Lauer & Lauer, 2008)
Impoverished people see the machinations of those of higher social status and see the injustice applied to their crimes while watching those of higher social status generally receive much less serious penalty.
This becomes their justification to rob, steal, sell drugs, run in gangs and racketeering. People participate in these activities because they see no hope for themselves and have been denied repeatedly opportunities to progress.
Poverty will not be relieved when training and education are beyond the reach of the impoverished. Poverty will not be relieved when programs cannot be funded sufficiently and consistently because of political ideology and political wrangling.
Poverty will always be with us. If society would truly be their brother’s keeper, then no one should be so hopeless that they feel compelled to become criminal, have high rates of illegitimate children who with their mothers become reliant on the state and also resort to crime to support their family. They view the reward outweighing the risks.
It has been argued that the left actually endorses and supports social programs to perpetuate poverty. This is an old and unsubstantiated claim. The unreliability of the claim is actually acknowledged and instead, relies on “possibilities” and what is described as “causal relationships”. (Brady, 2003)
Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment insurance; all these programs rejected by Republicans as “bad for America”. These programs and others have proven their efficacy over time and the only failure is some of the people within and without who have abused the system.
Without these systems, poverty certainly would be worse and correspondingly the tendency toward crime due to hopelessness, despair, rage and loss of dignity.
