Poverty & CrimeWith racist idiots the problems are obvious they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground
Crime and illegitimacy are both indicators of poverty and lack of opportunity. Race has nothing to do with it.
The notion that economic deprivation necessarily leads to lawlessness is widely believed but is not supported by empirical evidence. Human history is replete with examples of impoverished people—of all racial and ethnic backgrounds—who have endured extreme poverty without descending into criminal activity. During the 1960s, for instance, the residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown were among America’s poorest people—with the most unemployment, the worst housing conditions, the least education, and the highest rate of tuberculosis in their city. Yet despite such hardships, only five people of Chinese ancestry went to jail in the entire state of California in 1965.[1]
Similarly, Jewish immigrants to America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also repudiated criminality despite having to face extreme economic deprivation. Historian Max Dimont describes them:
“The majority of these immigrants had arrived penniless, all their worldly belongings wrapped in a bundle…. Most of [them] arrived in New York. Some made their way into other cities,… but the majority remained in New York, settling in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, [which was] a neighborhood of the poor. Sociologists, with their impressive charts showing the number of toilets (or lack of the), the number of people per room, the low per capita income, paint a dismal picture of the Lower East Side Jewish slum. But their charts do not capture its uniqueness. Though it bred tuberculosis and rheumatism, it did not breed crime and venereal disease. It did not spawn illiteracy, illegitimate children, or deserted wives. Library cards were in constant use.”[2]
Footnotes:
- James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 473.
- Max I. Dimont, Jews, God, and History (New York: Penguin USA, 1994), pp. 373-374. (This book was originally published in 1962.)
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