POVERTY AND CRIME

The criminal justice system continues to be mostly an aspect of the justice system in terms of academic
study. Despite the global crime and violent crime growing out of control, the study of criminal justice has
not yet received widespread academic interest and recognition. The Philippines' ineffective justice system
prevents the poor from filing lawsuits because they are aware that they cannot afford an attorney and that
it will take years for their case to be decided. The poor commit crimes to support their family because they
lack an acceptable source of income. Various studies on poverty and crime employ various definitions
and assessments of poverty.

Review of Related Literature

Crimes are considered a social phenomenon. It can happen anywhere, anytime, and can be committed
by anyone since anybody is prone to committing crime. Motorcycle “riding-in-tandem” is one of the
tactics/methods employed by criminals in committing crimes. This is one of the strategies performed by
perpetrators internationally (Vicente, 2015).

The Philippine setting. The problem of crime is not a simple one. The individual and his family and his
social environment are all involved and changes in economic conditions affect the amount of crime. The
task of the social reformer is to determine the causes of crime in a given society and to apply measures of
reform and prevention (The Detective, 2012). To guide this review we define poverty as ‘When a person’s
resources (mainly their material resources) are not sufficient to meet their minimum needs (including
social participation).’ Further, that poverty definition should be grounded in material conditions and
minimum standards. Poverty is centrally defined by a general lack of sufficient material resources, so it is
not the same as social mobility, well‐being or inequality (Goulden, 2013). Finally, that poverty is relative
and dynamic rather than absolute and fixed. Crime in a straightforward sense is law‐breaking, or more
conditionally, violation of the Criminal law as agreed within a given jurisdiction at a particular time,
although criminal law is usually enduring once established. The reasons certain criminal laws emerge and
not others, which laws are enforced, and who is prosecuted are contested. Although some laws such as
those against killing and the use of violence seem universally agreed as based on society’s moral
consensus, other laws may codify the interests of the influential, powerful and rich, and therefore are bias
against the interests and wishes of the poor, the powerless and those without a voice. As the title of
Reiman and Leighton’s (2010) study attests, ‘The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Prison’. For
example, the prison population contains disproportionate numbers of people who have lived in the most
socially deprived areas (see Houchin, R. (2005) Social Exclusion and Imprisonment in Scotland: a Report,
Glasgow: Glasgow Caledonian University.)

Poverty then might be a necessary, but it is not a sufficient, reason or condition why an individual
engages in criminal activity. Living in poverty on its own is unlikely to lead to engagement in criminality.
Carlen’s (1988) study of imprisoned women revealed that although poverty was common among
imprisoned women (see Radosh, 2003), and some of their crimes occasioned by either a necessity born
of poverty or a perceived need born of thwarted consumerism, they’d also led lives characterized by
feelings of powerlessness and frustration. Crucially, it was not only their poverty, but the fact they’d been
exploited and experiencing violence and abuse at the hands of (often criminal) men, that most narked
them out. While ‘poverty drugs’ provided a means by which to cope with a life of poverty and
marginalization, the women’s drug‐related crimes could give relief, or at least promised to give relief, from
living situations that were experienced ‘at the best as being bleak or at the worst as being unendurable’
(Carlen, 1988). Much of the literature related to the influence of poverty on crime, while conceding that
poverty was important, was redolent with other factors, such as family stress and disruption, school failure
and persistent truanting or persistent street‐based leisure that cemented or exacerbated this influence.
Sampson and Laub (1993: 247) in their long‐term study of poor criminal men in Boston, found that
influences on persistent offending such as poverty, are only indirect causes of criminality.

Although strong, the influence of poverty on crime is triggered by events and experiences of an intensity
and duration not easily captured by the catch‐all condition and connotation that poverty alone brings.
Triggers change over the life‐span and their significance may fade or come to the fore. Parental
unemployment and income poverty, important for child development gives way at late teenage and young
adulthood to the influence and availability of secure, stable employment. Delinquent and criminal
reactions to experiences of sustained poverty are in a sense quite momentous and exceptional. It
becomes quite difficult to identify and isolate distinctive influences and impacts why certain behaviors
occurred and other behaviors didn’t occur. It is rare that any single factor, event or experience acting in
isolation caused such a momentous outcome as behaving anti‐socially or criminally. There are likely to be
a combination of factors operating at once, separately or over time that direct the propensity to, and
probability of, delinquency and crime occurring (Rutter and Giller, 1984, Rutter et al, 1998). Poverty has
an impact on crime through a multiplicity of causal chains and pathways, all of which may singularly, have
a weak individual influence, but together are associated with experiences of living in poverty. There
combination in conditions of poverty increases the likelihood that a person will commit crime, be
apprehended and be the victim of crime (Laub and Sampson, 2003: 277; Lewontin, 2000: 88, 94).

Moving from individual‐level establishing of the impact of poverty on crime, to establishing the impact of
poverty on crime at a broader societal level, trends in post‐war economic inequality and poverty (and
some of the adverse policies associated with these trends) correspond to long‐term patterns of change in
the national rate of property crime. The steepest rises in the rate of property crime occurred during the
1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with sharp increases in the level of unemployment and inequality. For
example, as unemployment rose steeply from 1979, peaking in the mid‐80s and mid‐90s, it had
immediate and long‐term effects on the property crime rate.The finding that there is little direct influence
of poverty on crime is particularly true when more reliable self‐report data is used (Dunaway et al, 2000).
Other studies, however, find a strong and direct relationship between socioeconomic status and
offending, particularly in respect of the impact of childhood poverty and the effects of growing up poor on
persistent youth offending (Braithwaite, 1981; Jarjoura et al 2002; Hay and Forrest, 2009; Bjerk, 2007).
The disagreement seems to rest on how old or how recent studies are. A resurgence of recent studies
has found the relationship between social class and offending to be strong. Even quite old studies, and
certainly those that captured rising poverty in the 1980s and early 1990s, found that violent and property
crime were associated with absolute and relative deprivation and economic inequality (Kawachi et al,
1999; Kennedy et al, 1998; Messner, 1989). More generally, crime is more common in societies where
there are large disparities between the standards of living of its members (Hsieh and Pugh, 1993;
Kawachi et al, 1994). Also, the relationship, as we have suggested, between class, poverty and offending,
is forged through intervening events or experiences, that are contingent on opportunity and motivation on
the one hand, and structural factors such as family parenting, supervision and organization, on the other
(Lazelere et al, 1990; Sampson and Laub, 1993; Fergusson et al 2004; Wilson, 1990). The impact of
poverty on crime ‘… involves a complex interrelationship among mediating individual and community‐level
variables’ Valdez et al (2007:595) and, ‘hard evidence of this relationship is difficult to come by. There are
several reasons for this state of affairs, all having to do with the joint causality between poverty and crime’
(Fafchamps and Minten, 2006:579). Whether the relationship between relationship between poverty and
crime is direct, indirect or based on a loose association, the best, largest, long‐term, longitudinal studies
seeking to discover whether individuals from socio‐economically disadvantaged and deprived
environments have a greater propensity to engage in crime, come to similar conclusions.

The relationship between poverty and violence holds across different sorts of violent crimes including
murder, assault and domestic violence (Kelly, 2000; Martinez, 1996; Parker, 1989; Pridemore, 2011). This
relationship is best supported by the evidence because unlike other crimes, homicide and serious assault
are more likely to be reported or known through for example, hospital emergency admission (Hipp &
Yates, 2011; Lee, 2000). The precise mechanisms and processes whereby poverty has an impact on
violent crime can be seen in the frequency with which those who live in poverty engage in acts of violence
(Crutchfield & Wadsworth, 2005), and how poverty can precipitate spontaneous acts of violent rage
(Douglas, 1995; Hseih and Puch 1998). As Parker (1989:986) explains “…violence is one of the few
options available to those without the economic means to deal with problems or crises of everyday life.
Absolute deprivation may alsoproduce emotional situations which escalate into violence … simply put, the
absolute deprivation approach suggests that violence can occur among such individuals because
everyday life is difficult”. The structural consequences of poverty such as homelessness and poor housing
(Stark, 1987), distressed neighborhoods (Krivo & Peterson, 1996) and disrupted families (Sampson and
Groves, 1989) leads to frustration at such conditions, which in turn can lead to violent aggression (Hsieh
& Puch, 1998).

As Braithwaite (1991) has shown, more often than not, poverty driven violence expresses feelings of
financial humiliation among perpetrators who then feel they have a right to humiliate their victim.
Violence as a cultural reaction to economic hardship can become a relatively ‘normal’ way of dealing with
the problems of everyday life (Blau & Blau, 1982), and of garnering respect and status, and engendering
fear, in circumstances that would otherwise be humiliating, and even be passed onto children purporting
to be a legitimate form of interaction (Anderson, 1994; Cooney, 1998; Lee, 2000). Finally, the stresses
and challenges brought to masculine identity by changes enhancing women’s position of women has led
to increased levels of violence against them Bourgois, 1995; Walter et al, 2003). Many and relatively
recent cross‐national studies of homicide show that inequality and homicide are closely related, but is this
true for poverty and crime, especially as each of these studies failed to take into account poverty in their
analyses. Pridemore (2013: 739) however, after reviewing these and other studies, concludes that
‘poverty is the most consistent predictor of area homicide rates in the US empirical literature and a main
confounder of the inequality‐homicide association.’ Indeed, his studies (2007, 2011 and 2013) have
shown that when effects for poverty were included as well as for inequality there was a strong poverty‐
homicide relationship, while the homicide‐inequality relationship was weakened or disappeared.
Kapuscinski et al (1988) studied any unemployment effect on homicide in Australia from 1921 to 1987
and found this effect to be absent. The authors found female employment to be a significant determinant
of higher homicide rates. This supports the inference that increased female participation in the labor force
has created a crisis for some men sometimes expressed in violence.

There is no necessary direct relationship between unemployment and crime. The effects of family
disruption as a result of joblessness for example, may have just as important an impact on crime
(Sampson, 1987). In one of a series of important founding studies of the unemployment‐crime
relationship, Cantor and Land (1985) using time series data for the United States, from 1946 to 1982,
found a small but significant influence of the unemployment rate (‘economic hardship’) on property crime
but not violent crimes. Again, these relatively weak findings, as we shall see, ignored broader context,
and that their data belonged to a period when long‐term unemployment was more unusual and
experiences of poverty less concentrated, prolonged and more supported by welfare than has been the
case since. A similarly influential study by Chiricos (1987) reviewing data from when unemployment rose
dramatically in the 1970s, concluded that indeed total unemployment and the rate of increase of
unemployment have strong influences increasing property crimes. The effects on criminal motivation of
levels of unemployment not seen since the 1930s, led the author to conclude ‘…that work and crime are
the principal alternatives for most people to generate income… And, while the relationship between
unemployment and crime rates is far from perfect, it is sufficient to put jobs back on the agenda for
dealing with crime.’ (p 203)

Future Research Direction

The society is dealing with a number of societal issues and problems. One of these issues is crime, which
has an impact on every region of the nation and facet of social life. Population growth, unemployment,
and fast urbanization all exacerbate the criminality issue. The wide variety of criminal behavior cannot be
explained by a single formula or theory. A criminal could be a shoplifter who plunders groceries, a kind
young man who murders his family mysteriously and unexpectedly, or a hired gun who mercilessly
assassinates a government person. Additionally, the crime issue is undermining conventional social
controls, moral standards, family and social isolation, and the increased wealth enjoyed by some
segments of society.

Giving every Filipino the right to have a job or giving them the opportunity to get one is the government's
first step in addressing the problem, as poverty is one of the main causes of crime. If they are not given a
fair chance to get a job, they should provide them any opportunity that will allow them to get money
without resorting to violence or committing crimes. We should remove the stigma and allow those without
education to make money without committing crimes because not everyone is capable of learning and not
everyone can afford to do so.

Income inequality is blamed for being the main driver of violent crime by the majority of the literature.
However, earlier work on the topic largely neglects the role of poverty and income levels as opposed to
income inequality. The current paper uses all court verdicts for homicide cases in China between 2014
and 2016, as well as various inequality measures calculated from 2005 mini census data together with a
host of control variables to shed light on the relationship at the detailed Chinese prefecture-level. The
results suggest that it is the poverty and low income level, rather than income inequality, that is positively
related to homicide rates. We show that the internal rural-urban migration from more violent localities
contributes to the destination cities’ homicide rates. The poverty-homicide association implies that instead
of “relative deprivation”, “absolute deprivation” is mainly responsible for violent crime. Poverty is the
mother of crime. —Marcus Aurelius (121-180AD), Emperor of the Roman Empire.

There is a growing literature arguing that income inequality causes crime, beginning with Becker. The
mechanisms seem to be straightforward. For instance, the theory of ‘relative deprivation’ introduced by
Merton suggests that income inequality strengthens the feelings of dispossession and unfairness. The
inequality-crime association that empirically identified has been widely accepted. For instance, Messner
and Rosenfeld state that a ‘finding that has emerged with remarkable consistency is that high rates of
homicide tend to accompany high levels of inequality’, and solidified in both intra-national and cross-
national studies, but it is not without debate. A fundamental debate centers on whether poverty or
inequality drives violent crime. Although many studies show a positive relationship between income
inequality and the rate of violent crime, some critical studies using similar data argue that when poverty is
added to the regressions, income inequality is not significant anymore and poverty explains the crime
rate, while (relative) income inequality does not.

Money is really the root of all evil. Hunger makes a thief of any man. Many people will do anything to
make money, especially if it will help them feed their family. The growing population is one of the reasons
why there is poverty, so people who cannot afford to give their children a better life should not have more
children because it could result in poverty and poverty could result in doing crimes so they can feed their
children. There are many solutions to stop poverty and crimes, and one of those are to give jobs to
unemployed people and have scholarships for children so they can study and have a better future.
Although poverty may be a necessary condition for someone to engage in criminal conduct, it is not a
sufficient justification. Being poor on its own is not likely to result in criminal activity. Being a criminal or
not is entirely up to us. To make more money and provide a better life for our children, we need put in
more effort. It is preferable to use your hard-earned money to provide for your family rather than money
obtained by theft, robbery, or other criminal activity. Make your home a better place for your kids to live;
don't let them develop in a neighborhood where crime and violence are accepted norms. Being poor don’t
require you to commit crimes, work hard, or get wealth improperly. Although it can be a hindrance,
poverty is not a real barrier to our success. It goes without saying that having money of any kind
increases a person's chances of success. Poverty is never a hindrance to success nor a reason to
commit crime. Wealth does not straight away result into success for everyone; while those who are
wealthy tend to accomplish their goals quicker; their success in life still depends on their ability to work
hard for it. There are many people who are wealthy yet still commit crimes; they are utilizing their wealth
to do so. Being wealthy does not always imply success, nor is it a guarantee that wealthy people will not
conduct crimes.