Poverty doesn’t cause crime, Mr Mayor. Criminals do
by David Fraser, The Conservative Woman:
A FEW weeks ago the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, released a report showing how the poorest areas of London are the most likely to see the highest levels of violence, with 74 killings this year alone. Khan described this as a ‘direct link’ between violence and poverty. This was crass, even for a politician. Does he not know the difference between causation and correlation?
The implication we are invited to accept is that poverty is a driver of crime and violence; get rid of poverty and we rid our communities of violent crime.
This ridiculous Left-wing mantra has been doing the rounds for decades and we hear it from all political parties. The persistence of the idea that crime and violence represent some sort of crude reaction to poverty and inequality is all the more remarkable given that serious research and our own history contradicts this view. During the first half of the 20th century millions in Britain lived in abject poverty. The absence of a male breadwinner due to the great loss of life in the First World War, high levels of unemployment during the Great Depression, little or no financial assistance, hunger, poorly constructed and damp housing, restricted access to medical services, overcrowding, no internal sanitation, access to water via one cold tap or a shared pump in a courtyard, all represented the way of life for many communities. Yet in 1926, when hardship for working-class people was beyond anything we could imagine today, the rate for ‘violence against the person crimes’ was 4.39 per 100,000 of the population, a fraction of what it is today at over 1,400.
It is impossible to be poorer than the Haitians living in Cite Soleil, yet in 2010 they rejected armed criminals who tried en masse to re-establish their old fiefdoms after their break-out from prison following the earthquake. This once again undermines the idea that crime is some kind of primitive revolt against poverty.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
