Quote:
Originally Posted by knucklesplitter
Scott, there is no doubt that poverty and crime are related. I just wonder then why during the 60's did crime rise while poverty plummeted.
Experts attribute the huge increase in crime around 1990 to be caused by the crack epidemic. The recession in 1991 didn't help either I'm sure.
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I think in the 60's it wasn't that crime and poverty weren't related as they are today, it's just that there were so many people that got out of poverty when segregation ended and the civil rights movement took effect that the poverty rate plummeted.
Poverty created by inequality didn't correlate to crime... we just had a ton of people living in a "lower cast" that skews the chart. I'll bet that within the lower cast, the poorest of the poor were more apt to commit crime than the richest of the poor.
It's human nature... when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose... i.e. the primary reason why people keep to the moral high road is because they're afraid of the consequences, not because they just listen to their moral compass. IMO, that's the primary reason religions were invented in the first place... to get people to believe that if they don't do what their told, they're going to hell. "Listen to your father, or Zeus is gonna throw a lightning bolt right up your ass!"