Poverty Doesn’t Cause Crime

One of the first clues that this Columbia-educated, liberal, Democrat, New York Jew had that there was something wrong at the heart of progressive/left-wing thought was when I read and was taught over and over that “poverty causes crime.”

First, I thought about the world that I knew best — my own. My paternal grandparents were extremely poor immigrants from Russia. They lived in a small apartment in Brooklyn where they raised four children, none of whom, of course, ever had their own room. Moreover, my grandfather was a tailor and as such made little during normal years, and next to nothing during the Great Depression.

They were considerably poorer than the vast majority of Americans who lived below the poverty line as it existed when I was in college and graduate school. And they would have regarded most of those designated poor today as middle-class, if not rich by the standards of their day.

That is worth remembering whenever an American claims that violent crime in America is caused by poverty. The poor who commit murder, rape, and robbery are not only not starving, they have far more material things than the word “poverty” suggests.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey for 2005 (the last year I could find in detail — but it doesn’t matter what year, because those who say that poverty causes crime have said it for a hundred years and continue to say it), among all poor households:

Over 99 percent have a refrigerator, television, and stove or oven. Eighty-one percent have a microwave; 75 percent have air conditioning; 67 percent have a second TV; 64 percent have a clothes washer

Proverbs 30:5-9 ... 12-16 ESV

Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar. Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the Lord ?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.

There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth. There are those—how lofty are their eyes, how high their eyelids lift! There are those whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, the needy from among mankind. The leech has two daughters: Give and Give. Three things are never satisfied; four never say, “Enough”: Sheol, the barren womb, the land never satisfied with water, and the fire that never says, “Enough.”

Many of us here at FreeRepublic love to speculate about what it is that turns God's children into liberals. We consider superficial motivations like shaping by leftist education, peer influence, or even, more deeply, psychological need for power and control.

The deepest penetration into the sick soul of liberalism that I have witnessed on these threads confirms what I've learned in the rest of my life and it comes from an article written by Dennis Prager a "Columbia-educated, liberal, Democrat, New York Jew" who tells us that whether or not you are liberal depends on your view of the essential nature of man. Do you think the man is essentially morally good or morally evil?

Many readers will be surprised to learn that if one sees man as essentially good one is very likely to be liberal and if one sees man as essentially flawed one is very likely to be conservative. Most modern people instinctively recoil from labeling any given human as "evil"much less every individual that walks the surface of the earth. Those who are schooled in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in other words those who are liable to have read the Bible, know that the fundamental assessment of man is that he is a fallen creature, inherently evil, in need of redemption even more than education.

Jeremiah of the Old Testament (17:9, King James version), "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked" is echoed by the Pauline doctrine of the New Testament in Romans Chapter 3, " For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." The leftist believes that man is misinformed, uneducated, desperately in need of the leftists benign hand of guidance. His conception of God is that of himself hovering in the cloud above A Huge Skinner Box which embraces the whole world and everyone in it as he judiciously applies measured doses of affirmative stimulus to generate wholesome behavior. Think of Jonathan Gruber.

The Judeo-Christian Testaments reject the liberals' worldview and especially his role in it, or should we say, above it. We conservatives are in agreement with the founding fathers who held this pessimistic view of the essential nature of man and designed a government to compensate for our inherent shortcomings with checks and balances, enumerated powers and articulated rights in the people. Every branch of modernist thinking, however, attacks the fundamental departure point. So we have all of the pseudo-sciences from the Freudians, to the sociologists, to the racialists, to modern political scientists, not to mention all the spawn of the Frankfurt School rejecting this assessment.

I am a conservative so I want protection against the evil that men do especially when they contrive to leverage their power by getting into government. I am enough of a Calvinist to believe that culture trumps politics because that is the nature of man but I am also enough of a libertarian to believe that conservatives go overboard when they invoke government to address man's sins rather than his actions. I would leave the former to a higher judgment.

To return to Dennis Prager: poverty does not cause crime because it is the nature of man that causes crime. The reason people are criminals is, as Prager points out, for the same reason they are poor-character flaws, or, to use an archaic and politically incorrect term, because they are sinners.

The application of the liberal doctrine of the nature of man to prison doctrine, education, immigration, welfare etc. is limited only by the scope of today's headlines.

The war between us will never end until the war metaphorically described in Genesis comes to an end.

I grew up in a rural county in Alabama in the late 1960s and left in 1977. It’s safe to say that a quarter of the local population were in poverty or near it. Crime wasn’t a big deal and rarely did the local cop arrest anyone except for drunken driving.

Today? Same county has at least 300 meth-heads on a constant prowl to steal from neighbors or assault people for their cash. I’d take a guess that between the sheriff and the various town cops throughout the county....there’s at least sixty people arrested per week. Bad judgement, triggered by drug abuse...is the chief blame. Three years ago, we had some local guy who was killed by folks who’d heard the guy had sold his $20k boat and had the cash in his lakeside cabin. At least two of the punks will spend most of their lives in prison, for a random act of stupidity like this.

Of course.

Families struggled to succeed, IN SPITE of the challenges...

AND, there was irreversible, shameful stigma associated with law breaking of any kind.

My mother’s father owned a small coffee house and when he was 65, sold the business and the building.

THEN he took a job at the local coke plant.... (a steel mill). This was s dirty and dangerous job for an old guy.

He didn’t own a car and wouldn’t pay for a bus ride.

He got up daily and walked 4.5 miles to the plant. The local police all knew ‘old John’ and in bad weather, they’d give him a lift to work.

It never occurred to him to be idle and he never had debt.

I don't think he was unique in the realm of immigrants who came here in the early twenties.

Honestly, I grew up in a Hungarian, Ukrainian, Greek, Italian and Spanish working class neighborhood. (How's that for multiculturalism?) There were Portuguese and African Americans too.

Everyone worked and even the old ladies kept gardens and fruit trees. It certainly was NOT a hobby for them and I still remember all of them getting together to ‘put up’ fruit, etc. Their gardens and lawns looked like a picture. The earth was something special to them and even though the plots they lived on were small, it didn't make sense to them that they shouldn't GROW something on it. They came from a place where owning property was impossible.

Their gardens got them by and none of them EVER bought anything they could make themselves.

I remember all of them.

Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives. Drawn from the pages of the cutting-edge political and cultural quarterly City Journal, Dalrymple's book draws upon scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes that are by turns hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and all too revealing-sometimes all at once. And Dalrymple writes in prose that transcends journalism and achieves the quality of literature.

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