Poverty Mother of All Crimes Essay

Does privation cause horror? Are slew vile because they are poor, or are they poor because they are criminal? The latter is uncontroversial, given the time and professional and educational experience inmates lose, the difficulties they break finding a job after their release etc. barely what ab start the former statement? Crime obviously has m any causes, and need is most likely one of them in whatever cases. It seems likely that around poor passel may sometimes have to resort to larceny in order to survive. But the causal relationship surrounded by iniquity and exiguity is only likely for some types of disgusts. Other crimes, such as fraud, crimes of passion, serial murder etc. bear absolutely no connect to poverty. There may be crimson an inverse link, since poor people are non in a position to carry out a crime like fraud or insider trading.This paper lists some of the statistics that show a possible correlation between poverty and crime mainly property crime, mo re than violent crime. There is in like manner the withalt that African-Americans in the U.S. are overrepresented both in prisons and in poverty statistics (see here), indicating as well that there is a correlation. There is some anecdotal license (there are many news stories indicating a link, such as the stories about people stranded on a desert island, beingness work to extreme scarcity and engaging in crime such as murder and cannibalism). But theres also anecdotal secernate to the contrary. During the Great Depression, for example, crime did not increase significantly.Poverty can also be an indirect cause of crime. As it leads to under-education it may make the plectrum of a criminal lifestyle more likely. This graph shows the proportion of US inmates that is illiterate, compared to total US illiteracy(source) I couldnt find any data on previous illiteracy, so it may be that under-education (and consequently in many cases poverty) is not the cause of crime, but the con sequence being in prison in principle doesnt help you to start educated.Anyway, it seems intuitively acceptable that there is some causal link between crime and poverty, in both directions. So dealing with crime without dealing with root causes of crime such as poverty, and only focusing on punishment is indeed not the best option. However, none of this should implythat poverty somehow determines crime, or that crime is a incumbent result of poverty many poor people are not criminals, and many well-fixed people are that poor people are perhaps not predetermined to be criminals, but that they are more disposed to crime than other people that would be insulting that there are no other, perhaps more important causes of crime such as irresponsibility, ill-doing etc. that poverty is somehow an excuse for crime, or perhaps even a justification I think its not even a mitigating circumstance that poverty should be reduced to a difficulty of crime poverty, slums and homelessness should not be eliminated because they are so-called breeding thousand of crime, but because we have a moral duty to do so. presumption the causal link, we should also accept that poverty, like a bad upbringing, is oftentimes abused as a false excuse for crime.A link up question is the following are poor inmates incarcerated because they are criminal or because they are poor and cant escape the law as easily as the rich? Article 14 of the International stipulation on Civil and Political Rights gives everyone the right to legal defense, without charge if necessaryEveryone shall be entitled to have legal assistance assigned to him, in any case where the interests of justice so require, and without payment by him in any such case if he does not have suitable means to pay for it