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 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.
High crime areas are that way usually due to persistent intergenerational poverty and a lack of investment in the community combined with little to no local opportunity. That's how things are in the US at least, these conditions create desperation which leads some to desperate measures
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.
>Relationships between poverty and violent crime, specifically children growing up in poor households, have been well known for a very long time and the relationship continues to be shown repeatedly.
In almost all of the West, crime is associated to poverty. If you commit a robbery, being a poor is an "explanation". Individuals are rarely blamed, your circumstances determine your behaviour not your values.
This assumption breaks down once you leave almost any inner-city area, see levels of poverty that are at least as high in rural areas and there are very little crimes against people (although things like drugs are often common).
Drugs are part of it, culture, attitudes towards poverty, police behaviour, sentencing, social policy (i.e. welfare state, healthcare)...but yes, crime is basically out of control in societies with virtually non-existent levels of poverty.
Also, this doesn't have much to do with the subject. In the US, there have been cases of children walking through residential neighbourhood, a neighbour calls the police, the parents are arrested and then have to give up their children (there was one case where the parents actually lost their jobs too because they had jobs working with children, and they put on a register for child abusers)...suburban people have a fetish for crimes against children, crimes like this get treated very harshly but they let shoplifters or robbers walk free because of inequality, police in the US have no capacity for working with the community, it is completely unrelated to reality.
Much of crime is driven by poverty. If the consequence of poverty-driven crime is more poverty, then this negative feedback loop turns society into an incarceral state.
"Crime is a byproduct of poverty."
If that was true middle America would be full of crime and the coastal cities would be free of crime
That's the opposite of what is happening
And I’m saying that enforcement and morality are swamped by poverty and inequality.
I’d recommend trying to find any grounding in evidence of your claims because the poverty and inequality links to crime are pretty well established in the data.
Poverty isn’t the cause of crime. People were objectively poorer in the 1950s, even in the lower classes, and people in developing countries are much poorer than even poor Americans.
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