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Poverty and Violent Crime Don’t Go Hand in Hand, City Journal​

Many analysts, along with the general public, believe that poverty is a major, if not the major, cause of crime. But a new study from a Columbia University research group should remind us of something that history has consistently shown: that the relationship between poverty and crime is far from predictable or consistent. The Columbia study revealed the startling news that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of New York City’s Asian population was impoverished, a proportion exceeding that of the city’s black population (19 percent). This was surprising, given the widespread perception that Asians are among the nation’s more affluent social groups. But the study contains an even more startling aspect: in New York City, Asians’ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates. This undercuts the common belief that poverty and crime go hand in hand.

At 1.2 per 100,000, Asian murder arrest rates were nearly one-ninth of black rates. If poverty were the principal cause of crime, we would expect Asian rates to be as high, if not higher, than those of blacks. That the Asian rates are relatively low illustrates what I call the “crime/adversity mismatch,” a recurring phenomenon. As I observe in my history of crime: “Throughout American history, different social groups have engaged in different amounts of violent crime, and no consistent relationship between the extent of a group’s socioeconomic disadvantage and its level of violence is evident.”

When it comes to violent crime—murder, assault, robbery, and the like—history tells a complicated story. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impoverished Jewish, Polish, and German immigrants had relatively low crime rates...

In Great Britain, for instance, a criminologist observed that “all of the minority groups with elevated rates of crime or incarceration are socially and economically disadvantaged, but some disadvantaged ethnic minority groups do not have elevated rates of offending.” There, too, it was the case that Asians were more disadvantaged than blacks, but the latter had much higher offending rates.

African-Americans, for example, have had high violent-crime rates from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Poverty and Violent Crime Don’t Go Hand in Hand

Many analysts, along with the general public, believe that poverty is a major, if not the major, cause of crime. But a new study from a Columbia University research group should remind us of something that history has consistently shown: that the relationship between poverty and crime is far...

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