The psychology and root causes of global crime are not yet fully explored and are at the centre of a heated debate. Some people believe that poverty incites and is to blame for the majority of casual crimes, others argue that the problem lies within deeper institutional and class inequalities. This paper will consider both sides of the argument and make case for inequality rather than poverty being the prime reason for people committing crimes.
First of all, there is a reasonable amount of evidence linking poverty with crime, however, stating that it is the only cause of crime would be far too trivial. Webster and Kingston (2014) suggest that although poverty may be considered a necessary circumstance for committing a crime, the people that commit them are often driven by other reasons. For instance, research has shown that people committing crimes often feel powerless and frustrated being “exploited and experiencing violence and abuse” (Webster and Kingston, 2014, p. 5). Ultimately, the authors argue that poverty, defined as mere lack of material needs, in most cases cannot be the only cause for committing a crime. In turn, it is often accompanied by psychological problems and poor mental well-being which are larger consequences of social inequality.
Furthermore, apart from the specific psychological background of each committed crime, there are more common social problems caused by inequality that drive people to become criminals. In particular, the literature review on crime prevention done by WWF (2020) gives an example of countries with high poverty that do not necessarily have higher crime rates and vice versa. Moreover, the paper confirms that factors causing crime include “breakdown in social norms and values… unemployment, incomplete education, a break down in family structures, limited opportunities and exclusion from the formal economy” (WWF, 2020, p. 3). Therefore, the report confirms the ideas of Webster and Kingston by linking the causes of crime to a variety of factors associated with poverty and inequality alike.
Finally, though the aforementioned authors have proven that poverty cannot be a single root cause for committing crimes, it is still one of the major factors influencing people’s decisions. Papaioannou (2017) proposes that poverty may indeed be regarded as a decisive motive for the crime. The author argues that people constantly living on the line of poverty are, on average, more likely to commit a crime in cases when they feel that their well-being, income and lifestyle are put in jeopardy. Papaioannou elaborates on this idea by providing an example of Asian ex-British colonies where a “standard deviation decrease in annual rice production increases property crime by 21.2 percent” (2017, p. 25). However, the provided case study is too narrow to extrapolate its results to the entire world as well as the conclusions of the author do not really contradict the ideas presented in the previous paragraphs.
In conclusion, though it is hard to deny that poverty is a major reason for people committing crimes, it is far from being the only root cause. In fact, the prime motivators for committing a crime can be classified into two distinct categories: psychological and social. The former is often associated with feelings of helplessness and frustration caused as well as potential trauma of abuse caused by the living conditions of the lower class. The latter encompasses a variety of factors such as low levels of employment and lack of education which are, similar to psychological factors, are often caused by social inequalities rather than poverty itself.
References
Papaioannou, K. J. (2017). “Hunger makes a thief of any man”: Poverty and crime in British colonial Asia. European Review of Economic History, Volume 21, Issue 1, 2017, Pages 1–28.
Webster, C. S. and Kingston, S. (2014). Anti-poverty strategies for the UK: Poverty and crime review. Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
WWF. (2020). Literature review: Crime prevention and high-value poaching. USAID.