Posted on 01/05/2010 3:08:10 PM PST by MissesBush
If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?
The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the "root causes" theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.
The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.
The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.
If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
It’s simple. Fewer illegals. More guns.
"..It's an indelible image of what people will do during desperate times. For a while, Bonnie and Clyde were almost American heroes.
There's only one problem: The Depression years had very little crime.
With the economy's current troubles, many people assume a crime wave is just around the corner. But criminologists say that's just an American myth. .."
Heather MacDonald is one of the very best investigative reporters in the country.
Excerpt: The federal government last week said that after years of increases, the illegal-immigrant population in the U.S. dropped for the first time, between 2007 and 2008 - about the time that both a recession and tougher immigration enforcement began.
There is no profit in robbing a homeless person.
Maybe it causes crimes of desperation but if poverty caused all crime there would be no white collar criminals.
Bullseye. Enjoy reading it here, you’ll never see it in the State Run Media.
Demolished utterly and irrevocably but that will not affect the claims or the drive for Redistribution and Socialism one iota. Facts are irrelevant to liberals and citing them just proves how incompassionate you are.
Crime is caused by character or rather lack of it.
Crime also decreased over a (this) year that had unprecedented gun and ammunition sales. The American political class is immune to facts however. Reality must conform to their paradigm.
Appears to be the same ahole from Cloward-Piven.
Crime decreased as most criminals got jobs in the Obama Administration.
I had a LOL moment a few months ago while a clip of some journo interviewing a homeless guy. The interviewer asked about some aspect of being homeless. The guy bristled a little bit and told her he didn’t like being called homeless. He preferred ‘Urban Outdoorsman’.
Or they cut back on record keeping at a lot of police departments or as in the case of Detroit they just stopped keeping track altogether.
Bookmark.
BTTT
What about the areas where very few criminals are illegal immigrants? The problems in the industrial midwest generally don’t involve illegals.
Is the Richard Cloward mentioned in the article the same as the Cloward of “Cloward-Piven Strategy” infamy?
Let’s see. If you have 1 out of 10 criminals locked up, the crime rate will be higher than if you have 5 out of 10 criminals locked up. 4th grade math, I think.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.