Poverty and crime.

• Author: Watson, Jack

"Poverty is the mother of crime"

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus [121-180 C.E.]

Even ancient philosophers can oversimplify things. It is still often contended that poverty and crime go hand in hand, or that one cannot deal with crime without dealing with the root causes of crime such as poverty. These assertions carry with them some serious implications. Even if the speaker of such a generality means to assert that society has a duty to help those who have disadvantages -- not a matter of dispute -- the implications of such a generality should not be overlooked. It should be recalled that poverty, as we commonly understand it, is rarely a condition of choice and is usually the burden of those who lack the advantages of the rest of us. Moreover, while people can hide wealth, they cannot hide poverty.

The source of a generality that there is a link between poverty and crime seems to be the theory that people who have less will want to take from those who have more. Indeed, some of those who assert that generality advance that supporting theory in different formats. One suggestion, for instance, is that crime increases when the gap expands between the haves and the have-nots. Another suggestion is that poverty drives people to crime. No credible research supports this latter as a general statement and one would have to be careful with interpretation of statistics about the former. Even if have-nots would like to be haves, it does not mean that people with less will take in a wrongful fashion from those who have more. When Dr. Johnson said that poverty was a "great evil", he did not mean that it was the expression of evil people, but that failure to deal justly with it was a moral fault of society.

It is plainly unfair to people in poverty to suggest that they are more disposed to crime than other people. There is no gene that has been identified linking disposition to crime with poverty. If so, one might have thought a massive crime wave would have swept western Canada during the Great Depression. It did not. If anything, people may have been more generous to each other then. Moreover, many of the greatest artists, philosophers, and thinkers of history have been poor people. Yet, the greatest thieves in history have been people with lots of wealth and power. The list of larcenous political autocrats is long.

Basically, the problem with a generality like this is one of faulty logic arising from over-simplification of relationships between facts. What...