This involves a massive confusion of cause and effect. The same factors which make for poverty tend to make for more lawlessness. It is not poverty which causes lawlessness, but poverty and lawlessness have some roots in common.
However, the still more interesting and obviously neglected factor, here, is that the Black crime rate has borne a proportionate relationship to the extent of liberalism in any community--i.e., the Black to White per capita crime rate is directly proportionate to the extent a community accepts "Liberal" premises. And this has been true since the early 1900s. For example in the immediate post World War II era, the ratio was about 3 to 1 in most of the South, but only 1 to l in South Carolina. In the more Conservative Northern States it was about 5 to 1. In New York and Massachusetts, it was about 8 to 1. By 1960, in the most "Liberal" States, it had risen to 12 to 1, as the "Liberal" excesses became more pronounced. It was still, however, about 1 to 1 in South Carolina!
It is not "poverty," but "Liberalism" which breeds crime. It is also the chief cause for poverty. Why? Its denial of human reality saps the incentive to succeed at anything. Its provision of crutches for failure promotes failure.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site