Crime Source, Essay Example

Notoriously perhaps the most easily traced cause for crime, poverty is usually first turned to as the motivation when criminal activity is in any way related to gain. There is a rationale to it, as reprehensible as the crime may be. We can understand it because, in an illegal manner, it’s a case of demand creating a supply.

The story is old: from 1920, Grove Dow writes, “Poverty produces and is the product of crime….When we touch one we generally find the other” (p.415).  It is of course much older than that, as well. In recorded civilization, the link has always been observed. In its most sympathetic manifestations, crime is explicable, if not praiseworthy. The man steals to feed his family, the African-American boy breaks into the jewelry store due to frustration at having no other opportunities in life; these are well-known tales.

Poverty, however, is far too large a social dilemma in itself to be so consistently pointed to as motivation. Any blanket acceptance of deprivation as excuse/reason for crime ignores the many layers within ‘poverty’, and caters to a simplistic understanding of the common human desire to have more. It does not address how deprivation on varying scales is equally instrumental as a motivator for good. Meanwhile, far less sympathetic to the public at large is when poverty breeds, not theft, but destruction.

The rampant and violent looting in Los Angeles in the 1990’s, for example, was seen nationally as an inevitable exploding of suppressed, racially-driven oppression. Yet this only touches the surface of the issues, for many natives of the city, poor themselves, were horrified by the riots. Less obvious in searches for how poverty triggers violent crime leads us back to how multifaceted an issue poverty is. It creates, in effect, a perpetuating cycle, as pointed to by Dow above, for cities or neighborhoods in the grip of poverty are not able to establish meaningful methods of preventing the crime. “Minority communities with high levels of homicide are places with….high levels of structural poverty that erode the abilities of these communities to effectively combat crime” (Hawkins, 2003, p.92).

The only viable means for reducing crime in poverty-stricken places is, of course, through ending the conditions creating the poverty. This must be applied in a foundational manner, from the bottom up, and not in a panacea-like way of funding limited, and therefore ineffective, measures. Only when this occurs, and the poverty is actually waning, can a true relationship between poverty and crime be determined.

References

Dow, G.S. (1920.)  Introduction to the Principles of Sociology. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

Hawkins, D.F.  (2003.) Violent Crime: Assessing Race and Ethnic Differences. Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press.