Poverty includes more than just household income. In particular, many of the comparative areas you mention provide: safe schools, libraries, extended family resources. Population density is also a huge driver of violent crime rates.
Of course poverty isn't the only factor. But it's a hugely important one.
I'm not convinced that systemic poverty is the cause. Plenty of poorer counties and non urban, but just a poor, areas in the USA don't have these high violent crime rates.
Poverty and crime. I do not deny that they correlate but I've yet to be convinced It is reflection of causality. Perhaps are we asking the wrong question?
The poorest towns in America don’t have the highest crime and the richest towns don’t have the lowest. Attributing violent crime to poverty alone does a disservice to the people living in places with violent crime.
>the very strong link between poverty and (certain types of) crime [0].
"Very strong" is not a very useful description. Quantitative explanations are important. Unfortunately, your linked paper is not available. This one is:
Poverty is listed, but it is not a stronger effect than religiosity, family disruption, or firearms ownership. The strongest effects found in this meta-analysis were from "strength of non-economic institutions" and "unemployment (length considered)".
It is always a little frustrating to hear from a certain kind of politically motivated poster who is very interested in in-depth critiques of any theory of crime except their own conviction that poverty is the sine qua non of theft and violence. The evidence does not support this view.
I couldn't find a paper with a quick google, but i did hear in a recent podcast that it is exactly income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) rather than absolute poverty that is the biggest predictor in criminality.
Here is a clip that mentions it; if I can find a paper to reference i'll edit this comment when I get home:
This is intuitive but wrong; the balance of evidence is that poverty does not drive people to crime.
During economic contractions in the west for example, crime does not spike. 2008, or even the great depression: No crime jump.
In the past in the west, when everyone was much poorer (1960's back to 19th century) crime was often substantially lower even than now. We're talking 1930's slums here.
Poverty correlates with crime, but the causation is probably the other way: Crime destroys wealth of a community.
Or it might be a third cause: The kind of people who commit a lot of crime in their community are also the kind who are economically dysfunctional in general and will create poverty for themselves.
Of course poverty isn't the only factor. But it's a hugely important one.
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