Logical Explanation?

January 24, 2008 5:56 AM

Why do the poor commit more crime? Is it because they are irrational? (via marginal revolution)

The actual paper is in the first link. I don't seem to be able to link to it directly.

posted by wittgenstein (105 comments total)

Seinfeld/ What's the deal with these poor people?
posted by nola at 6:05 AM on January 24, 2008

ugh. economists are ugly people.
posted by eustatic at 6:06 AM on January 24, 2008

What first link?? The only link I found in that blub was to a pdf on prison inmates....
posted by HuronBob at 6:06 AM on January 24, 2008

Poor people commit more crime?
posted by peeedro at 6:13 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
posted by unixrat at 6:15 AM on January 24, 2008 [10 favorites]

How about: because criminals are poor?
posted by billysumday at 6:15 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Why do the police only arrest poor criminals? Why are only poor defendants put behind bars?

MORE LIKE
posted by DU at 6:18 AM on January 24, 2008

Why do the poor commit more crime?

Because if you're struggling, financially and socially, illegal acts are more attractive (vs. the risk of getting caught) than if you have all you needs met (and then some). Also, if you're rich, you can hire a great lawyer and the charge just goes away.

But I should probably read the paper. We're supposed to be discussing the "perfinal.doc", right?
posted by LordSludge at 6:23 AM on January 24, 2008

Educated Criminals work within the law, as Morissey tells us.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:25 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

"A lot of drug dealers earn minimum wage." To an economist this is a surprising finding that demands explanation. The surprise to me is that apparently no economist has ever worked a minimum wage job. Getting covered in grease and burns and working on your feet until two in the morning ain't the same as breaking bricks of weed into quarter ounce baggies in the comfort of your living room, even if they pay the same. What a perfect illustration of the hole sitting in the middle of economics--it's all about money.
posted by Nahum Tate at 6:26 AM on January 24, 2008 [15 favorites]

Also, a marginalized person by definition has little investment in the status quo. To them, a law is just an arbitrary rule, whereas to a better-off person a law is part of the structure that keeps them afloat. There's less disincentive to break the law. (Not to mention that a desperately poor person might actually prefer to be in jail than wherever they are barely living.)
posted by DU at 6:31 AM on January 24, 2008 [4 favorites]

Because there are no laws against the real crimes?
posted by regicide is good for you at 6:34 AM on January 24, 2008 [11 favorites]

Ok. Then why do people with high paying jobs, families, homes, etc also do more white collar crimes than the poor? Opportunity is close by. Still irrational, though.
posted by Postroad at 6:37 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

It's not pathological or irrational. Poor people are willing to take far bigger risks, relative to their net worth and income, than rich people. Bill Gates would not commit one-tenth of his income or net worth to something that has a 1 in a 1000, or worse, chance of paying big. But poor people will commit one tenth of their income to scratch tickets that have those kind of odds, because the payoff is valuable enough to them to make that a rational strategy. Similarly they will be more willing to trying to become professional basketball places, or to engage in crimes for financial gain, like larceny or drug-dealing. Assaults, murders and rapes are a byproduct of that behavior, most of the time.
posted by beagle at 6:43 AM on January 24, 2008 [3 favorites]

I'm sure the basic theory presented has some bearing on some people's lives and reasons for commiting crime/being lazy and self destructive/being fat. Blanket theories like this are kind of simplistic and useless, though. Seems more an exercise in philosophical auto-fellation than serious research, though I might should shut up and RTFA before I go crapping all over this guy's effete appologism...

....

...Nah. Fuck him.
posted by Pecinpah at 6:46 AM on January 24, 2008

Join us later for Playboy's expose, "Why Do Single People Masturbate More?"
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 6:47 AM on January 24, 2008 [4 favorites]

Join us later for Playboy's expose, "Why Do Single People Masturbate More?"

I'm waiting for the article that describes how the rich people jerk each other off and totally ignore the poor people.
posted by Mikey-San at 6:54 AM on January 24, 2008

I would tend to agree with both Postroad and Beagle. Stated more categorically, I would say that white collar crime is irrational, as there is a far greater risk vs reward ratio. As to what Beagle says, blue collar crime (is that the phrase for it?), even with a low possibility of payout is at the very least more rational as there is less to be lost. Look at figures about crime during high periods of unemployment. Less to lose, more incentive to commit crime. I would be interested in seeing figures on white collar crime and finding a similar connection to an external factor.
posted by horsemuth at 6:54 AM on January 24, 2008

Oh...I get it! Economists are robots!

Ok, now it makes sense.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 6:55 AM on January 24, 2008 [4 favorites]

It's no great stretch of the imagination to think that poor decision making skills, due to either lack of education, upbringing, or mental handicaps would to both low income prospects and a propensity to irrational behavior (of which crime would generally be a part).

But the author does seem to have missed the obvious difference in disincentives. Prison is a disincentive for almost everyone, but it seems to be obviously a much greater disincentive for someone with a house, a car, a retirement plan otherwise good prospects than for someone with no money living off the street.
posted by justkevin at 6:58 AM on January 24, 2008 [3 favorites]

Bill Gates would not commit one-tenth of his income or net worth to something that has a 1 in a 1000, or worse, chance of paying big. But poor people will commit one tenth of their income to scratch tickets that have those kind of odds, because the payoff is valuable enough to them to make that a rational strategy.

That doesn't make any sense. Bill Gates needs one-tenth of his net worth a lot less than a desperately poor person needs one-tenth of theirs. There's nothing rational about investing money in scratch tickets that cannot be expected even to pay for themselves, particularly not if one needs that money for basic sustenance.

I would tend to agree with both Postroad and Beagle. Stated more categorically, I would say that white collar crime is irrational, as there is a far greater risk vs reward ratio.

I don't know how you can be comfortable categorically state this. The pecuniary reward of white collar crime can be very high compared to blue collar crime (even an average bank robbery doesn't net all that much), and we don't really know what the risks are, because white collar crimes are so much more likely to go undetected entirely.
posted by "Tex" Connor and the Wily Roundup Boys at 7:00 AM on January 24, 2008

Poor people commit more crime?

That's why we should disarm the poor.

.
.
.

What?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:00 AM on January 24, 2008

I would speculate that one point to consider is that, when you are poor, the fall (financially, socially, etc) you would suffer from being prosecuted for a crime does not appear to be that great.
As opposed to the fall a wealthier person would suffer from similar prosecution.

Additionally, to a poor person, committing a profitable crime, in general, is most likely viewed as a means to a necessary end...keeping the lights on, feeding the kids, paying the rent. Real jobs are scarce in poor areas. It should be no surprise that people would see crime as a potential option.

A white-collar crime isn't the same. They're almost always a crime of convenience, rather than a crime based on real need. One could argue the "addiction of wealth" aspect, as well...the more you have, the more you want.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:01 AM on January 24, 2008

Join us later for Playboy's expose, "Why Do Single People Masturbate More?"

I'd be very surprised if that were actually true.
posted by psmealey at 7:11 AM on January 24, 2008

There is some good research done by psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson that addresses and dispels of the notions of the "irrationality of crime" and "crime as pathology". They write:

There is considerable evidence that persons who engage in risky criminal activities discount the future steeply.

What would make persons discount the future? Perhaps they have good reason to believe that they don’t have much of a future.

in Chicago, there are large variations in life expectancy between neighborhoods, and expected future life span is a good predictor of neighborhood-specific homicide rates, even if expected life span is computed with the mortality effects of homicide itself removed

If the mortality rates in your neighborhood are high, and it is possible that you can die any day from causes outside your control, and you know it, taking risks and engaging in criminal behavior is quite appealing. Daly and Wilson are quick to point out that

such inability to delay gratification is usually interpreted as a sign of immaturity and pathology

and are quick to dispel the notion. They write:

steep discounting of the future is just what a properly functioning evolved psyche might be expected to do in the sorts of social and material circumstances that are especially likely to foster violent crime.

posted by AceRock at 7:14 AM on January 24, 2008 [22 favorites]

I don't know how you can be comfortable categorically state this.

My point exactly. I can be comfortable stating this categorically because I have nothing to lose. My risk is only looking like I'm shooting my mouth off about something I don't know about. The reward is generating an interesting conversation about something I have a feeling is true and possibly learning something.


The pecuniary reward of white collar crime can be very high compared to blue collar crime (even an average bank robbery doesn't net all that much), and we don't really know what the risks are, because white collar crimes are so much more likely to go undetected entirely

Yes, but as justkevin points out, the disincentives are greater. Which you apparently agree with as you seem to understand that those crimes are less likely to be found out, prosecuted, or given the possibility of greater access to better lawyers, prosecuted sucessfully.
posted by horsemuth at 7:15 AM on January 24, 2008

source for my comment above.
posted by AceRock at 7:20 AM on January 24, 2008 [4 favorites]

Yes, but as justkevin points out, the disincentives are greater. Which you apparently agree with as you seem to understand that those crimes are less likely to be found out, prosecuted, or given the possibility of greater access to better lawyers, prosecuted sucessfully.

If white collar crimes are less likely to be discovered and successfully prosecuted, in what respect are the disincentives greater?
posted by "Tex" Connor and the Wily Roundup Boys at 7:22 AM on January 24, 2008

Do you think that the upper-class twit that wrote this has ever been poor? Does he have any idea how few opportunities there are when you're poor, uneducated, speak with an accent associated with poverty, and most importantly, don't know anyone who is outside of your class? I've been temporarily poor at times in my life but I'm educated, can talk with a TV anchor accent, and have friends and family who are successful and who have lent me money in tough times. There are huge hurdles to get over if you want to go from being poor to being middle class and generally crime is easier than trying to get over those.
posted by octothorpe at 7:23 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

steep discounting of the future is just what a properly functioning evolved psyche might be expected to do in the sorts of social and material circumstances that are especially likely to foster violent crime.

So poor people are rational, after all, and generally hurt fewer people than the rich, who steeply discount the long-future in order to achieve short-term gains. (Cf. discounting future value of undeveloped or unpolluted real estate, etc.)
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:29 AM on January 24, 2008

Because they think small, and they get caught.
posted by Artw at 7:29 AM on January 24, 2008

To summarize the moral here:

Every political question does not necessarily have an economic answer.
posted by koeselitz at 7:34 AM on January 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

If white collar crimes are less likely to be discovered and successfully prosecuted, in what respect are the disincentives greater?

Because the absolute loss is greater. As we agree, the likelihood is less, but the risk of not only what one currently has but the greater opportunities that someone with money or resources could potentially have in the future (the discounted future scenario mentioned above is also at risk.
posted by horsemuth at 7:37 AM on January 24, 2008

Yeah, these types of economists seem to perenially fail to understand that a lot of the bad decisions poor people make aren't totally irrational within the system those decisions are made. We're talking about a closed socioeconomic system that is totally starved of resources and opportunity. Within that system the long shot odds of successfully navigating the drug world and winding up financially secure for life without getting killed or spending life in jail actually don't appear terribly unfavorable when compared with a life of barely scraping by doing the shittiest work available in the marketplace, having to commute long distances to do that work for long hours and get relatively little in return.

This is why Sudhir Venkatesh especially deserves applause as an academic who is willing to step out of his office and go do some field work to try and understand better exactly how the system he's studying works, because it's a completely separate system from the mainstream American economy and can't be expected to work on exactly the same principles.
posted by The Straightener at 7:40 AM on January 24, 2008 [3 favorites]

POOR IMPULSE CONTROL
posted by everichon at 7:45 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

If white collar crimes are less likely to be discovered and successfully prosecuted, in what respect are the disincentives greater?

White collar criminals have more to lose.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:50 AM on January 24, 2008

Also, a marginalized person by definition has little investment in the status quo. To them, a law is just an arbitrary rule, whereas to a better-off person a law is part of the structure that keeps them afloat. There's less disincentive to break the law. (Not to mention that a desperately poor person might actually prefer to be in jail than wherever they are barely living.)


Or, more succinctly, poor people commit more property/street crime because they have less to lose.

The people suggesting that wealthy people commit as much crime as poor people are deluded and/or stupid. Despite what you've heard in Pete Seeger songs, not all poor people are saints with empty pockets. Many are awful people with a huge sense of entitlement. But so are many wealthier people-- however THEY have a bigger incentive to play by the rules or they could lose everything.
posted by Mayor Curley at 7:51 AM on January 24, 2008

Folks, i live in bed-stuy which is mostly an enclave of the urban poor. forget about white collar crimes that go unprosecuted for a second and reflect on spitting and littering... i would call a safe bet the statement that poor people litter and spit more in places where i wish they wouldn't (subway cars, etc.). when i see this i think "you f-ing ignorant slob"... and i don't feel bad because people who spit in the subway or throw fast food garbage out the window of their car or a gnawed-on chicken wing bone in the stairway of my apartment building... these people are ignorant slobs...
posted by eedele at 7:59 AM on January 24, 2008

Because we assume that the system that leads to the rich/poor division isn't itself a criminal enterprise?
posted by symbioid at 8:11 AM on January 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

Or, better yet: He who makes the money, makes the rules.
posted by symbioid at 8:11 AM on January 24, 2008

If a teenage girl decides to have an out-of-wedlock child and go on welfare, it is because she has determined that the up-front benefits of the child and the government's financial assistance outweigh the long-run costs of foregone earnings and diminished marriage prospects.

I suspect that whatever theory posits this has never tried to understand a pregnant teenage girl.

Humans in distress are likelier to make irrational decisions. The poor are more distressed than the rich. The likelihood that you will find more irrational decisions being made by the poor than by the rich is no surprise. Any theory that might assert that all decisions of criminality are completely related to economic analyses have a naive sense of what humans are capable of, and this may lead to a biased notion of what constitutes rational behavior.
posted by effwerd at 8:26 AM on January 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

forget about white collar crimes that go unprosecuted for a second and reflect on spitting and littering

I'd reflect upon smoking. Obviously not a crime. But if statistics indeed show that "the poor" are more likely percentage-wise to smoke than the "non-poor," the question is why. Ignoring the health hazards, smoking is a terrible economic choice, given the cost of cigarettes now and the fact that politicians will only add to that tax burden in the future.
posted by kgasmart at 8:36 AM on January 24, 2008

From the link: Dealing drugs - like most illegal behavior - is an inane strategy for escaping poverty.

Am I reading this wrong? The implied argument seems to be something like:

* People are driven by the desire to get richer, and adopt behaviors they expect to satisfy this desire.
* If you are thinking rationally, it's clear that driving drunk and assaulting people will not make you a lot of money.
* Poor people are more likely to get arrested for drunk driving and assault than rich people.
* Conclude: poor people suffer from a deficit of rationality.

If I read the paper instead of the blog post, would it make more sense? (This is not a rhetorical question: often good arguments get compressed into seemingly bad ones when summarized.)

By the way, Caplan, the author of the first link, is a self-described libertarian/anarchist whose book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, got a lot of press recently. His description of the development of his economic thinking is here: to summarize, "Until I went to college, I thought Ayn Rand was exactly right, but now I only think she's basically right."
posted by escabeche at 8:41 AM on January 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

"Hunger makes a thief of any man."
posted by Bighappyfunhouse at 8:41 AM on January 24, 2008

People are still having committing crimes
Their victims keep on hurting
Nothing makes them stop
This law thing's not working
posted by Smart Dalek at 8:46 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

I think there might be some merit to this economic finding, but I think his treatment is missing some important points.

One factor that has been linked to both low income and social deviancy is early brain development. By early, I mean pre-natal and within the first two years of life. These are crucial years for brain development, and people in poverty may not be able to access quality prenatal medical care and nutrition. In addition, they may not have the knowledge of what constitutes post-natal nutrition, may not be able to afford medical care for their babies, and are often living in excessively stressful environments that may give severe challenges to cognitive and emotional development of the newborn. Add to this inferior housing and sometimes folk medications contributing to ingestion of dangerous lead content, and early brain development suffers further. This can and does lead to poor reasoning skills, poor impulse control, and difficulty fitting into the middle-class defined milieu of employment. For someone in this position, crime may be a survival mechanism or simply what they drift into.

In addition, the decisions that people in generational poverty make are actually rational economic decisions -- they only look irrational in a middle class milieu. For example, if you are living at a survival level, people you can depend on (such as family) become the only asset you really have. So seemingly rational middle-class expectations like "You don't take off work every time your grandmother is sick" seem irrational, because it's hard to see the economic benefits of staying at work when your family has never experienced them. Likewise, crime may seem irrational compared to, say, a full time job at a factory pulling in $9/hour. But many of the poor don't have that to compare to -- they're looking at minimum wage with much worse working conditions, a high chance of being fired because of a lack of skills (including middle-class based hidden rule job skills such as 'job over family in most cases'), and no change of advancement. Other survival skills in generational poverty -- aggression as a response to challenges in the environment and a focus on taking one's mind off their meager surroundings -- may be more suited to crime than to the middle class.

Why don't people in generational poverty CHOOSE to follow middle-class rules? Often, because they haven't learned them. You might want to look at Ruby Payne's work on the "hidden rules" of social class.
posted by lleachie at 8:46 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

I heard a statement once: "Morality is for those who can afford it". While I used to think it was a useless oversimplification, now I find it hard to dismiss it. There is some truth there...
posted by ohdeanna at 8:47 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Because the absolute loss is greater.

Is it? I see tons of white collar criminals on the news who come out of prison, and still have many of the same opportunities (and in many cases, the wealth) they had when they went in.

Anyone remember the story about Ivan Boesky actually deducting half of the 100 million dollars he was forced to repay from his taxes and paying other prisoners to do his laundry? Extreme case to be sure, but I don't see country club prisons in any poor criminals futures.
posted by JaredSeth at 8:54 AM on January 24, 2008

Because we assume that the system that leads to the rich/poor division isn't itself a criminal enterprise?

Boy is that putting blame where it doesn't belong. An ambitious, law-abiding person is free to make something of themselves, with relatively little interference and a spot of systemic help when it's needed. To blame the system for people's criminal choices is nonsense.
posted by edverb at 8:54 AM on January 24, 2008

Dear god, the comments on that first link.
posted by moonlet at 8:58 AM on January 24, 2008

I agree that blaming "the system" is pretty meaningless... "the system" is us, you, me, them, everyone, no one...

but- that's quite a rosy view you have "an {meaning any?} ambitious, law-abiding person is free to make something of themselves with relatively little interference and a spot of systemic help when it's needed.." There are a lot of people out there who do not live in a system with these attributes that sound so fair and accessible...
posted by mistsandrain at 9:03 AM on January 24, 2008

Why do the poor commit more crime? Is it because they are irrational?

Yes, of course. What!?
posted by shmegegge at 9:03 AM on January 24, 2008

What I want to know is why poor people buy less ugly yachts.
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:04 AM on January 24, 2008

There are a lot of people out there who do not live in a system with these attributes that sound so fair and accessible...

I think there's a divisor between a perfectly fair & level playing field and equal accessibility on one hand (and only a sheltered fool thinks that exists), and criminality on the other. Not everyone is born with equal advantages, but that's no excuse to resort to crime. Efforts to level the playing field are worthwhile and we all bear responsibility for that, but we do not bear responsibility for an individual's choice to break the law. That's on them.
posted by edverb at 9:17 AM on January 24, 2008

There's little money in assault, drug possession, or drunk driving,

Well, yeah, you don't buy drugs to make money-- you buy drugs to get high! And assault is not irrational in a world in which if you *aren't* more violent than those around you (or at least, don't occasionally prove yourself tough enough so no one messes with you), you will be even poorer soon.
posted by Maias at 9:21 AM on January 24, 2008

edverb: "Because we assume that the system that leads to the rich/poor division isn't itself a criminal enterprise?

Boy is that putting blame where it doesn't belong. An ambitious, law-abiding person is free to make something of themselves, with relatively little interference and a spot of systemic help when it's needed. To blame the system for people's criminal choices is nonsense."

My point with that sentiment, was I hoped, clarified by my next comment. That is, "it's not a crime when "we" do it" says the wealthy." It's ok for them to rip people off in crazy schemes (i.e. Scientology, Amway, Microsoft), but because it's the ones who made the rules, they get off much more lightly.

The "system" of capitalism, IMO, promotes this kind of attitude in the first place: survival of the fittest, get ahead at the expense of the little guy. When rich people do it, it's the moral thing. When poor urban kids do it, it's a crime. Crack Dealers are the same as... McDonald's, IMO. Both traffic in horribly destructive shit. One just has a semblance of respectability being "food" and all. The gun at your back is just a bit more hidden when the rich white dudes pull off their heists.
posted by symbioid at 9:38 AM on January 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

"Join us later for Playboy's expose, "Why Do Single People Masturbate More?"

I'd be very surprised if that were actually true.
posted by psmealey at 7:11 AM on January 24 [+] [!] "

I saw a great presentation on the sex lives of women insured with Kaiser Permanente, that I think is still unpublished, showing clearly that divorced women were having three times as much sex as married women. So I'd also guess that single people are masturbating less.
posted by roofus at 9:42 AM on January 24, 2008

The crimes of people who are poorer tend to affect fewer people per incident, whereas the crimes of people who are richer/hold more power tend to affect more people.

Why do rich people screw over so many people, is it because they are irrational, or just sociopaths?

And, I would argue everyone is a law breaker somehow and in someway, be it great or be it small.
posted by edgeways at 10:03 AM on January 24, 2008

I've read the paper, and it's very depressing how it leans so heavily on Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, which has already been subject to a book-length refutation. In addition, Caplan is so unwilling to go outside his own disciplinary boundaries that he ignores a lot of research in criminology and sociology, even though some of this literature might provide limited support for his assertions about sources of irrational behavior among the poor (e.g., interpersonal violence in poor families, low birth weights in poor neighborhoods). Caplan also forgets a basic sociological explanation of crime: Travis Hirschi's theory of how the presence or absence of stakes in conformity explains individual decisions whether to remain law-abiding. We do not commit crime based on what we have to gain. We commit crime (or not) based on what we have to lose. How else do you explain the widespread phenomenon of stealing office supplies? The gains from stealing office supplies are minimal in any financial sense, but millions of otherwise law-abiding people do it. Why? Because nobody gets punished for it. It's an almost costless crime. And because of its costlessness, millions of people--both white collar and blue collar--end up doing it.
posted by jonp72 at 10:03 AM on January 24, 2008 [4 favorites]

Crime is just one of many, many "social pathologies" that are over-represented among the poor: alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking, obesity, illegitimacy, etc. None of these are good escape routes from poverty. So instead of trying to explain why "poverty causes crime" or "poverty causes obesity," it makes sense to look for common causes of poverty and social pathologies.

The common cause being lack of money. Smoking, drinking, drugs, junk food etc are all relatively cheep thrills. So they are bad for you, lead to addiction etc... but someone who is on the breadline don't think about that they want a bit of an escape from reality. And as many have already said, it's the same with crime... if you need money for food or to escape eviction tomorrow you'll do it.

It's the writers of the paper who are irrational not the poor.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:10 AM on January 24, 2008

The "system" of capitalism, IMO, promotes this kind of attitude in the first place: survival of the fittest, get ahead at the expense of the little guy.

Symbioid, I disagree insomuch as capitalism is not a zero-sum game. It is a creative force, which can and does create new value. It is a system whereby one can "make" money. You're conflating the entire American system -- everything from multinational corporations to entrepreneurship to workaday lunchpail joes -- with a criminal system, and it just ain't so.

Using Microsoft as an example (you call them a crazy scheme) their business has contributed to the creation of entirely new industries. Ask any Active Directory guru who's work helps run enterprise systems, or an MS SQL DBA. Hell, ask an office temp who is able to get work due to their proficiency with MS Office apps and they can attest to the creation of jobs around MSFT work product. Moreover, their operating systems (comprised of how ever many millions of lines of code, the product of countless paid manhours of development, and available for a relatively paltry sum) was essential to the rise of the commodity PC, which brought previously unthinkable computing power to the average household. I have more computing power (an an OS which makes it fairly seamless for me to use) in my laptop than it took to send men to the moon and bring them back. That is not a "crazy scheme", it is progress.

Crack Dealers are the same as... McDonald's, IMO. Both traffic in horribly destructive shit. One just has a semblance of respectability being "food" and all. The gun at your back is just a bit more hidden when the rich white dudes pull off their heists.

Comparing McDonald's to crack dealers is just crazy talk. (And mind you, I don't eat fast food or do drugs for that matter.) Only one of those products can kill you dead as a poisoned roach (or turn you into a zombified wretch with one single purpose -- to score more and more until you're dead) just like that.

Our system does not give the OK to rip people off in crazy schemes -- there are laws on the books against monopolies, insider trading, cooking the books, bribery and the like. And when the Microsofts (or worse still, the Enrons) of the world run afoul of them, they pay consequences. You can debate whether it's "getting off lightly" -- MS may be forced to follow new guidelines and pay fines and recompense, where Enron mucketymucks wind up in jail.

That all said, I suspect if forced to choose, you and I both would sooner be robbed at the point of a pen (and/or vexed by an arguably inferior, but standard OS produced by a monopolistic company) than the point of a gun held by a crack addict.

Either way, it is emphatically not the fault of the system that crackheads debase themselves and rob innocent people, any more than it's the fault of the system that Enron bilked people out of their retirement accounts. Criminal behavior is a choice and it is not excusable.
posted by edverb at 10:14 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Crackheads can't afford guns, duder, I know it's a compelling image but I don't think you could find crime stats to back it and throwing this kind of urban mythology into the mix doesn't help rational discussions about crime rates, poverty and their correlates.
posted by The Straightener at 10:19 AM on January 24, 2008

he ignores a lot of research in criminology and sociology

You've managed to identify a field of study that's less of a science than even economics.
posted by Kwantsar at 10:22 AM on January 24, 2008

also by the author: Amore Infernale the complete graphic novel
posted by afu at 10:32 AM on January 24, 2008

The Straightener...I see in your profile you live in Philly, like I do. Do you really need stats to back up the correlation between violent crime and drugs? Just look out your window!
posted by edverb at 10:36 AM on January 24, 2008

Hip hop videos. And that is a semi-serious argument. Also, the mass celebrity obsessed culture (particularly in the UK at the moment) that glorifies retarded f*cktubes being given free rein to smoke crack*₁, inject heroin into the gaps between their toes*₂ and beat up random people in the streets*₃ and get away with it just because they've got the money to hire a decent legal team.

People see this and think "If they can do it then so can I" and unfortunately fail to take into account the rather important "...hire a decent legal time" part of the argument. Incidentally - being poor doesn't make you a criminal. I am poor. Being a fucking idiot makes you a criminal.

*₁ Pete fucking Doherty. Again.
*₂ Amy Winehouse.
*₃ Any Premiership footballer you care to name.
posted by longbaugh at 10:37 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Couple points. First, I'm surprised nobody's done a FPP on Sudhir Venkatesh (mentioned above). He's a sociologist who studied the economics of street crime by actually going to the streets & collecting data from the people involved, somehow managing not to get killed in the process. Amazing work, really eye opening.

Second, on the disincentive of prison. I think one factor that needs to be taken into account is that there are criminal cultures that cross over between civil & prison societies that make prison a lot less threatening to those who belong to them (street gangs, white power thugs, organized crime families of various nationalities). Some of them like the infamous MS-13 are becoming so powerful within prisons that they're threatening the integrity of the system itself.
posted by scalefree at 10:45 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

POOR IMPULSE CONTROL

You just couldn't keep from posting that, could you?
posted by Standeck at 10:54 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Why do rich people screw over so many people, is it because they are irrational, or just sociopaths?

I'll ignore the fact that I don't know that this is categorically true, and just accept your premise: I think rich people/ companies/ etc behave in a way that could be identified as 'screwing people over' because as a mechanism, it is a fairly expedient way of increasing ones wealth.

More specifically, I suspect that in a lot of cases, decisions are made purely for financial reasons, which, taken solely in the context of increasing and maintaining one's holdings, may be a completely sound choice. But when viewed as part of a larger picture, it becomes clear that following such a decision would cause harm to some people. From the perspective of the decision maker, it might be a small enough impact to warrant moving forward, whereas from the point of view of the person on the bad end of the stick, it's a life altering change.

I'm thinking of situations where a company might decide to change their health insurance in some small way that provides more money for share-holders. This little change only disallows a few minor conditions that the previous one didn't. A trivial issue if it's making you more money, a really big deal if your medication is suddenly no longer covered.

In other words, it's not malice. It's indifference.
posted by quin at 10:55 AM on January 24, 2008

edverb...while I'm not going to go as far as to equate McDonald's with crack dealers, I do believe that there is a nugget of truth to what Symbioid presents. Certainly, capitalism, academically, is the engine of creation that you describe. No argument there.

However, I think all one need do is look around to see how capitalism, as practiced today, does indeed engender a broad range of questionable, practices which often prove horribly destructive to those in the middle and lower classes. We live in an age where "Maximum profit by any means" is the battle-cry. It's an expression of legitimized and institutionalized greed. The results of following that flag are becoming clear. The whole mortgage fiasco is an easy target here. Health insurance? Universal default? These are just a couple of systems which look to be organized, not to serve their customers effectively, but, rather, to suck a maximum amount of money from their pockets, no matter what the resulting harm to that customer. I think this is the side of capitalism that Symbioid is pointing to.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:58 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Virtually everyone I know commits crimes quite frequently. It's just that people don't count the crimes that they commit, because those crimes are harmless, not at all like the bad stuff that other people do. Most of the people I knew in grad school did drugs, some did a LOT of drugs. They never got arrested because they were upper middle class. Poor kids go to prison for the same shit. We've created a society that values obedience far more than freedom. Rich people profit from the rules and in any case are forgiven for their transgressions. Poor people get shafted by the rules, are constantly monitored by law enforcement, and get the book thrown at them when they get caught doing something. This is why most "criminals" are poor. As per gun-toting crackheads... who would you rather be robbed by, a gun-toting crackhead, or someone pulling the strings of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen? Not many crackheads can claim to have caused the deaths of millions.
posted by Humanzee at 11:00 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

The Straightener...I see in your profile you live in Philly, like I do. Do you really need stats to back up the correlation between violent crime and drugs? Just look out your window!

Ed, I'm a social worker, buddy, I've spent a lot of time working in Kensington, West Kensington, Fairhill, Feltonville, Hunting Park, Mantua, Belmont, etc., etc., etc. I'm also a freelance writer, so I have documented quite a bit of what I've seen in these neighborhoods. Of course, there is a correlation between the drug trade and violent crime. However, you painted a sensationalistic picture that is not in line with reality in order to support your punitive world view. I think if you looked at the totals of armed robberies and gun related homicides in the city last year, crack addiction is not going to correlate quite as strongly as you make it seem. The city's gun violence problem is not a crack addiction problem. In fact, in all the mountains of press the city's gun violence problem received last year, I can't remember a single instance where crack addiction was reported as the motivator behind the violence.

This isn't to say that crack addicts aren't capable of violent crime. It's also not to say that there isn't a strong correlation between gun violence and the city's drug trade. But part of the problem with addressing the nation's poverty problem is the unwillingness to do the work necessary to accurately assess exactly what the problems are, and painting sensational pictures based on vague notions from a safe distance doesn't really move the discussion in the right direction, you know?
posted by The Straightener at 11:04 AM on January 24, 2008 [6 favorites]

Here is the question I have, and I'm not sure there exists a firm answer: Do poor people commit more crimes, or do they simply get arrested and convicted of those crimes more often due to their inability to mount a sufficient legal defense? How statistically significant are cases of legally powerful folks getting out of- but still committing- DUIs, drug possession violations, or white-collar crimes?
posted by maus at 11:13 AM on January 24, 2008

I guess we're coming at this issue from different angles, Straightener. Obviously there's a high correlation between poverty and crime, my (admittedly oversimplified) analysis is coming at it from the anti-crime perspective. You spend your life trying to address the deep woes of our city down to the individual level and look for societal causes and effects to address -- which leads you to examine poverty among other things. I'm not...I'm just a honest, working guy with a family who doesn't want to get shot by criminal (and most likely, drug trade) scum. Mayfair may be a "safe distance", but it's not all that safe or distant. ;-)

My original point was that I don't believe that the life chooses you, but that you choose the life. You are working in the capacity I described earlier as "a bit of systemic help", and I'm sure you must be exasperated at times because your clientele doesn't always want or use the help you can provide. (My wife teaches Head Start in South Philly, and a lot of her kids are from non-intact families, living on public assistance, their parents have no job or prospects, and still some of these parents see the education system as babysitters which allow them to spend their days messing up their lives and that of their kids.)

You are the system, just like my wife is, and like all of us taxpayers are -- and I'm saying it's not your (our) fault that some people are incorrigible, criminal fuckups.

All things considered, let me put it in historical context. (I don't mean to sound jingoistic, so please keep in mind this is a longview.) Across all the categories you care to quantify -- an American alive today could hardly have been born at a better time in history, in a better, free country, with more opportunity and choice than any of their immigrant ancestors enjoyed, a free public education, opportunities for college education, a robust job market, and social mobility...and still, some people choose horrible lives of crime and inflict misery on everyone around, all the while blaming the "system" and squandering all their blessings.

So I have great admiration for the people like you who do what you do, and the academics who study the root causes and seek to address them. I'm all for fairness and opportunity. At the same time, I see my lazy, good for nothing but drug use and littering, shameless leech neighbors and I don't blame the system for their plight (Not just one or two, it's every other house now). I blame them for overtaxing the resources the system provides. I'm subsidizing their unrelenting bad choices. Compared to them, the system is quite functional. They're not.
posted by edverb at 11:31 AM on January 24, 2008

"Not everyone is born with equal advantages, but that's no excuse to resort to crime."

NEWSFLASH: MANY POOR NOT CRIMINAL.
posted by klangklangston at 11:41 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Another point: irrational behavior among the poor isn't just about crime, it includes generosity as well.

Do you really need stats to back up the correlation between violent crime and drugs?

There may be a correlation but I suspect this has more to do with the criminals involved than the drugs. Make drugs legal, take this market away from them, and they'll fight over something else.
posted by effwerd at 11:53 AM on January 24, 2008

Way to misinterpret, Klang.

NEWSFLASH: POVERTY NOT A VALID EXCUSE TO COMMIT CRIME.
posted by edverb at 11:54 AM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Why do the poor commit more crime?

The rich have better lawyers.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:30 PM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

You've managed to identify a field of study that's less of a science than even economics.

You've managed to make a statement that has less empirical value than the paper in this FPP.
posted by jonp72 at 1:41 PM on January 24, 2008

It's not that crime is rational; it's that working within the system is insufficiently rational if the system is working against you.

If you are born white, middle-class, in an educated family, you are likely to have
(a) the message, from your culture, your neighborhood, your family, that if you work hard and stay on the straight and narrow you are likely to wind up at least moderately successful
(b) evidence to back that up, because many of the people around you have worked hard, stayed on the straight and narrow, and wound up moderately successful.

If you are born into intergenerational, cultural poverty, the message you're going to get is: it doesn't matter. You can work all you can and it won't make a difference. Or you have to work three times as hard as the other guy for it to make a difference. It's a sucker's game, why play? And you're going to get evidence to back that up, because even if we argue that now everyone has equal opportunities (which is in itself dubious), even a generation ago that certainly wasn't true. And that's what you'll hear (even if it's never said) from people who are older: don't try to work within the system, because it won't work.
posted by Jeanne at 1:41 PM on January 24, 2008 [4 favorites]

Wait, wait, the question is "Why do marginalised people act in ways that contravene the structure of the society?" and we're actually spending time debating the question? Really?
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:53 PM on January 24, 2008

This is truly high quality post, and I'm glad that Wolfenstein has "raised the bar" for discussions on socioeconomic themes on MeFi - it's usually a pretty left-wing extremist pseudo-intellectual cesspool in here, to be frank.

That being said, after perusing this paper I think I can offer a few criticisms, given my pretty intesive autodidacticism in the field of economics.

I think the first point to make about the question "why do the poor commit so much crime?" is that the real answer is "because they smell bad".

That's one reason for getting rid of welfare, obviously. But another one is simple maths. Let's say a poor single mother is so smelly and poor that she is considering eating her own children to stave off hunger. If you liberals decided to give her $15,000 (say) to stuff herself full of poor people food - probably cigarette-flavoured crack, I honestly don't know what poor people eat - then you might think you've saved a baby's life. But the fact is, the poor, lazy stink-mom will soon realise that if she eats her child anyway, she's now $15,000 in profit. And that's why welfare is for irrationals - it's simple economics.

But probably the biggest fault with this study is that it perpetuates the use of the term "poor people". Actually, the poor aren't people at all. They are sub-human apelings, who should be all rounded up and shot. Except that putting the burden of paying for the bullets on the humble taxpayer would be a REAL crime! Ha ha ha! So let's just hope the poor - say, the entire country of Mozambique - just throttle themselves with a sock, or something.

Another question I'd like answered, however, is this: how come the poor don't publish any papers in economics? I assume it's 'cause they're so fucking stupid they can't read, but maybe it's also related to the fact that they stink like shit. I hope these authors turn to that question next, and give it the same thoughtful and reasoned analysis - and well-written presentation! - that we see in this wonderful paper.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 1:54 PM on January 24, 2008 [5 favorites]

yeah, poor means criminal, but not for the reasons you think.
posted by milarepa at 1:55 PM on January 24, 2008

Criticising the choices of others is unseemly. All of you have been presented with the same options: monstrous antarctic smelting facilities or massive body grinders, all running 24x7 under the ominous glow of high-pressure sodium lamps.

Rich, poor, rational, irrational, all are laid low by their own choice. None are forced to choose which alternative they desire, but instead may choose freely, exerting their own perfect Will; labor unto death, or the gaping maw of whirling hammers?

Some will choose labor, some will choose the grinders. Everyone is equally free. Writing blurbs about how some are predisposed to choose the grinders rather than being chained to an ore loader is pointless and demeans you both. Revel in your selection, just as they will surely revel in theirs.

Animals howl at each other as they are separated in the slaughterhouse. Humans should have more dignity. Proceed in silence.
posted by aramaic at 2:06 PM on January 24, 2008

Many activities — from over-eating, drinking, smoking, and drug abuse to crime and unprotected sex — combine immediate gratification with delayed costs. We argue that it is no coincidence that the poor are much more prone to engage in such activities than the rest of the population.

As AceRock points out above, the leap from this statement to claims that the poor are irrational is not quite direct. Beyond the uncertainty as to how long your future might be, look at the products and messages aimed at the poor. PayDay loans is encouraging and profiting off the behavior that these economists, and I dare say all of us, would prefer not to encourage. In fact, the credit industry has many Americans behaving poor irrational. To claim irrationality here also implies that the delayed costs are understood. In reality the PayDay loan companies rely on their borrowers not understanding the costs.

The problem with "the system" is the similar to the issue of the commons. While it is slightly in everyones interest to educate "the poor" so that they can make better informed decisions about their money, it is very much in the interest of a small group to keep them ignorant. As we all know, in our political system is it very easy for a motivated minority to change the situation for their benefit over an unmotivate majority.
posted by betaray at 2:09 PM on January 24, 2008

Here's a striking fact about crime: A lot of it is almost never lucrative.

Well! Your argument is now made plain to me through your lucidity and precision of language.

This is so idiotic and oversimplified I can't believe this guy even has a job. I love it when somebody thinks he's lightbulbed a solution to thousands of years of economic, sociological, and psychological history and philosophy, posts on his weblog, "I'VE GOT IT! Poor people are just DUMB!", and then smugly sits back and waits for the acclaim.

It's like Descartes trying to describe animals - "The most that one can say is that though the [poor people] do not perform any action which shows us that they think, still, since the organs of their body are not very different from ours, it may be conjectured that there is attached to those organs some thoughts such as we experience in ourselves, but of a very much less perfect kind."

Maybe next he can put on a space suit, venture out to the ghetto and trap a real live poor person in the wild, using a jug of Sunny D and a crackpipe as bait. Then he can observe his subject through glass with a puzzled expression on his face, periodically asking questions through an interpreter - "Now, I just can't understand, so let's go over this again - why would you spend seven dollars each night on a value meal at the McDonald's next door when it costs two dollars less at the McDonald's downtown? And especially when for that price, you could buy a pack of boneless skinless chicken breasts, a bag of brown rice, and a stalk of celery and make yourself something much healthier? What do you mean you 'don't have no stove?'"

And what will he say to the problem that the foundational principles of libertarianism - rational self-interest and the invisible hand - cannot then apply to the teeming masses of irrational poor people? I suppose it's nice to see someone actually being upfront about the libertarian mindset about the poor, although it seems like this guy probably didn't even realize that and will be all surprised when his buddies elbow him in the ribs and hiss "Duuuude! Shut UP! We're not supposed to admit we know that libertarianism only benefits the rich!" But, you know, attesting that millions upon millions of people lack the trait that supposedly separates humans from animals isn't offensive, it's just telling it like it really is. We don't need to worry about them, they're practically automata anyway.
posted by granted at 2:09 PM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Is this really so difficult? Most poor people are honest, law-abiding, hardworking individuals. Some of them DO turn to crime (as do many wealthier individuals - but it doesn't count when you're ripping off billions from other wealthy folks I guess. Oh, and putting a lot of poorer, hardworking people out of work when your "white collar" crimes are exposed.) I'm sure some ARE just thugs who enjoy hurting others but there is a LOT more going on that doesn't have anything to do with poor people being "irrational."

Q. Why do so many people smoke/drink/take drugs instead of staying sober like "rational" people?
A. Because they are surrounded by it. Because they start at a young age before they are mature enough to understand the consequences of their decisions. And because when you have practically nothing and see no future and are surrounded by hopelessness and can't see a way out sometimes you just want to get wasted and forget about it for a little while. I mean, Jesus, there are people HERE who can't even bring themselves to post without smoking a bowl first and I'd be willing to bet that most of those folks aren't living that far below the poverty line.

Q. Why do people sell drugs instead of getting an education and bettering themselves like "rational" people?
A. Because most of these folks have seen from a young age that getting out is practically impossible. Not everyone is smart enough to win full rides to University (I've always loved this particular argument - just get straight As and get a full scholarship! Yes, of course! Such an easy option! EVERYONE can do that! Especially when you come from an extremely underfunded public educational system!) If you aren't an exceptional student or you can't get financial aid and you come from a family that considers macaroni and cheese that doesn't come from a box a "luxury" your options become pretty goddamned limited. And when you have a family to feed and that family is hungry TODAY and you have the choice to sell a little dope and make some cash by mid-afternoon or work for two weeks at a minimum wage job that offers no benefits and wait for a paycheck that won't even cover your family's grocery bill, selling drugs becomes the rational option.

And let's not forget - the people at the top of the drug cartels, the people who make sure there are drugs to sell, are not the "scum" you see peddling dope on the corner. The people at the top usually have government connections, teams of lawyers and live in rich neighborhoods behind iron gates.

Q. Why would a poor person spend a dollar on a lottery ticket instead of investing it in their mutual find like a "rational" human being?

A. Because sometimes dreams are all you fucking have and you're willing to spend a dollar for fifteen minutes of daydreaming about a chance, however improbable you know it to be, to be able to provide your family with the future you'd kill yourself to give them. And because lottery retailers target their advertising at the poor. Do you you take the time to complain about this to your representatives when you are enjoying a game at the new stadium or helping your kid out with a homework assignment from the new textbook bought with state-sponsored gambling revenue?

Q. Why do poor teenage girls get pregnant instead of waiting until after marriage like a "rational" person?
A. Because teenagers have sex. And the poorer you are the less access you have to decent sex ed and advice about birth control. There is a strong religious undercurrent to many poor communities as well and abortion is often not an option, especially when you are a minor and need parental consent.

This just more "blame the victim" crap from people who like to roll their eyes and sniff,"why can't poor, trashy (black) people be more like wealthy, middle class (white) people? Why, there are opportunities everywhere! Haven't they ever heard of a 401k? Why must they breed like rabbits and sell drugs? Why don't they just go to college and get middle-management positions like normal people?"

An ambitious, law-abiding person is free to make something of themselves, with relatively little interference and a spot of systemic help when it's needed.

You and I have very different ideas of what it means to be "free."
posted by LeeJay at 2:14 PM on January 24, 2008 [4 favorites]

You and I have very different ideas of what it means to be "free."

Care to elaborate?
posted by edverb at 2:44 PM on January 24, 2008

I don't suppose the answer is: "because there are lots more poor people?"
posted by pompomtom at 2:50 PM on January 24, 2008

Humanzee said it, but it needs repeating: because of differential enforcement. The original article specifically mentioned drug crime. Poor people aren't commiting more drug crimes - they're getting caught more often, because the police are watching the Brixton/Harlem street dealers, not the bankers doing coke at Canary Wharf/Wall Street.
posted by Infinite Jest at 3:11 PM on January 24, 2008

You and I have very different ideas of what it means to be "free."

Care to elaborate?

Sure. Your statement rests on the assumption that everyone starts out on a level playing field; that everyone will go through life with "relatively little interference" and spots of "systemic help when it's needed." This is simply not true. Poor people receive plenty of interference and often the "systemic help" works against them rather than for them. Racial and class profiling. Glass ceilings. Discrimination in the workplace. A biased and unbalanced legal system. Unequal access to properly-funded education and quality healthcare. Evidence all around them that that tells them that they have no future other than a hard life of back-breaking work and little to show for it at the end. Broken families. Drug and alcohol abuse. Little social support. A world that looks down on them, consistently undervalues them (and likes to publish articles by economists talking about them like they're silly, stupid children.)

There will always be exceptions - brilliant but dirt poor students who manage to break through the class barrier and those in the upper classes who fall through the cracks due to mental illness or substance abuse or extremely poor decision-making - but for the most part, a kid born into a middle class or upper class family is born with barriers already removed and a system designed to benefit him and a kid born into poverty is born with the decks stacked against him.

Pretending that everyone has the same freedom to move through society is either disingenous or naive. Some people are more free than others and claiming that they are not simply because things are better now than they were before puts all of the responsibility on the shoulders of the weakest among us without addressing the fact that the system itself is designed to support the wealthy and keep the working class poor.
posted by LeeJay at 3:42 PM on January 24, 2008 [9 favorites]

Or to put it another way: if you put Person A in the middle of a park with a few bucks in his pocket and tell him he can go anywhere he likes and you take Person B and put him in a padlocked cage with just the clothes on his back and tell him that IF he can figure out how to get out of the cage he's free to go anywhere he likes, would you say that both Person A and Person B are being afforded the same freedoms?
posted by LeeJay at 3:59 PM on January 24, 2008 [2 favorites]

LeeJay, I largely agree (and said as much in subsequent posts).
posted by edverb at 4:39 PM on January 24, 2008

Criminal behavior is a choice and it is not excusable.
...
Efforts to level the playing field are worthwhile and we all bear responsibility for that, but we do not bear responsibility for an individual's choice to break the law. That's on them.

I don't know why you want hammer this point home so hard. We've got the whole personal responsibility/culpability part of it covered. That is why we threaten people with punishment by imprisonment (or death). The fact is, we put too much stake in that perspective and we now live in a country with overly harsh prison sentences that don't do much good at deterring crime. In fact, we turn nonviolent drug offenders into violent criminals after we release them from prison. "Efforts to level the playing field" are more than worthwhile; they are vital. Removing inequity and desperation in our society as much as possible is the best (maybe only) way to eliminate crime (as much as possible).
posted by AceRock at 5:08 PM on January 24, 2008

I may be an economic reductionist in my own research, but in this case I think it really doesn't work.

I think that the culture of a community can have a huge influence on how someone feels about the law, and how much stake they have in supporting it. I grew up in a subsized housing building with many people who were working poor or on welfare, but the culture that I was exposed to was one that was generally very law-abiding. These are the kinds of people who have cousins who are police officers and who, though not rich by any means, see the system as important. It is true that most of the people in my immediate community were white or recent immigrants from communities that had good relations with the police.

Whereas in communities with a history of bad relations with the police, the whole orientation towards the law system is different. My neigbourhood was also partly Jamaican, a community that has had bad relations with the Toronto police, and I remember that the kids whose parents were Jamaican felt differently about the police than I did. And if you feel threatened or an enemy of the police, this bleeds into your entire relationship with the law. Economics is a part of it -- but I think culture is just as much. It's not just true of black communities, though that was the case in my neighbourhood. Elsewhere in Canada, native communities have very bad police-community relations.

Now, I wouldn't say that police-community relations are a one-way street. People do get treated very differently by authority figures based on their appearance, skin colour, accent, etc. Communities whom the police and the law have historically treated very badly unsuprisingly don't like the police and the law. Unfortunately, these things feed on each other. Historical oppression by authority - leads to contemporary contempt of authority - leads to present day bad treatment from the same authority. The question is: how do you break this cycle?
posted by jb at 5:21 PM on January 24, 2008

White collar criminals have more to lose.

Yeah? Fine me $125K for stealing anywhere from $7 to $21 million dollars and I’ll do a nickel in a federal country club standing on my head.

“The gun at your back is just a bit more hidden when the rich white dudes pull off their heists.”

2nded. (et.al similar statements)

“I suspect if forced to choose, you and I both would sooner be robbed at the point of a pen (and/or vexed by an arguably inferior, but standard OS produced by a monopolistic company) than the point of a gun held by a crack addict.”

So the answer is not defy the system, the answer is game the system?
I myself would rather be held at gunpoint by a crack addict. In part because I’m bulletproof (hey, y’know, I’m Smedleyman), but mostly because the crack addict cannot do much damage on a wide scale.
At some point the taxes I pay go to shut him down even if he swipes my ready cash. Whereas in the latter case, I must pay not only far more in taxes to shut down the machinations of a monopolistic company, but risk that company from co-opting the mechanisms I employ to stop them from robbing me, not to mention co-opting my representation in government in writing the laws that are to protect me.
And indeed, this is precisely the case is so many instances they’re nearly uncountable.
Joe Crackhead can only take my wallet. He can’t take my freedom, my home, deny me the right to marry as I will, the right to reproduce or not as I will, deny me the right to ingest what I will, limit where I may go, how I may speak, etc. etc. etc.
At worst he can shoot me (but y’know, it’d just ricochet off). Bad as that might seem in the short term, in the long term, you’re better off.
But all that ignores the real problem - it's precisely that the great mass of people are being robbed at the point of the pen that causes them to rob at the point of a gun. All that subtracts, bit by bit, from the opportunities, access to weath, betterment, etc, in the aggregate.
Gaming the system by folks at the top causes defiance of it by folks at the bottom.
posted by Smedleyman at 5:59 PM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

Or to put it another way: if you put Person A in the middle of a park with a few bucks in his pocket and tell him he can go anywhere he likes and you take Person B and put him in a padlocked cage with just the clothes on his back and tell him that IF he can figure out how to get out of the cage he's free to go anywhere he likes, would you say that both Person A and Person B are being afforded the same freedoms?

I just want to second this (and third, and fourth it).
posted by The Light Fantastic at 6:40 PM on January 24, 2008

Case in point. I recently served as a juror on an attempted murder case involving a 16 year old kid who was shot in the back. (And Smed, unfortunately the bullet went right through the kid -- the only things that prevented this from being a murder case were bad aim and rapid medical attention.)

I realize my comments here aren't going to garner any favorites and there are plenty of very smart people here who disagree with the position I take, and I respect that. But if anyone here were on that jury, and this defendant raised some Charlie Manson "the system fucked me, it's society that's guilty" defense, I'd venture to say no one here would have acquitted. And if I'm right about that assumption, what does that say for the counter arguments?

Is the playing field level? No. Is opportunity equal? No. Can unrestrained capitalism be profoundly unfair, even criminal? Unquestionably.

But this grave crime wasn't the fault of capitalism, or the system. It wasn't the police's fault, or the legislature's, or the schools. None of those institutions are remotely near perfect, but let's put this in perspective. In a case like this, blaming those institutions are cop-outs. This was the fault of the thug who shot him, simple as that.
posted by edverb at 8:57 PM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

I dare not try to remark on any of this. Why?

Because I have not lived in multigenerational poverty.

I thought I could talk intelligently about the importance of literacy once. I had even lived in a country with another language in another alphabet, and seen how it disabled me. Then I moved to a country with a nonalphabetic writing system, and I discovered that I hadn't known the first thing about illiteracy. And the first thing to know about illiteracy was the magnitude of its effects. And that was the only disadvantage I had: I had money, status, supportive and helpful friends, safe housing, transportation, health, and education. I just couldn't read, and it thrashed every dimension of my life.

I have no reason to suspect poverty is any less powerful.
posted by eritain at 10:59 PM on January 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

In a case like this, blaming those institutions are cop-outs. This was the fault of the thug who shot him, simple as that.

Absolutely true...in the here-and-now of that immediate case.
However, as a supposedly advanced society, {insert "greatest, most powerful, wealthiest nation evar" statement here}we have to look beyond the here-and-now to understand (and correct) the problems that produce thugs such as the one on trial.

If we never step beyond that narrow, short-horizon focus and correct those core problems, we are dooming your children and grandchildren to sitting in judgment of even more thugs.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:18 AM on January 25, 2008

I doubt anyone is still reading this thread, but I would just like to point out that it is a false dichotomy say its either solely the individual's fault, or things in his or her environment were factors. It was and always is both.
posted by AceRock at 7:34 AM on January 25, 2008 [2 favorites]

It was and always is both

Yeah, but it's just neater and easier for the lazy or ideology-driven to choose one over the other.
posted by psmealey at 9:14 AM on January 25, 2008

“let's put this in perspective. In a case like this, blaming those institutions are cop-outs. This was the fault of the thug who shot him, simple as that.”

Two different things there edverb. It’s the same form of argument, for me, as it is for serving troops. If a given soldier commits an illegal act (war crime), he is not excused because of the atrocities going on around him.
Neither, however, can he be blamed in the aggregate, for the war if it’s an illegal war, that’s the fault of the nation and of the leaders who drove it (and folks who didn’t oppose it).

So is the junkie - or whomever - to blame for whatever crime they commit (given it’s not civil disobediance or revolutionary in nature - in which case they have the moral high ground but are still going to get in the neck from the authorities - I’m thinking Thoreau here) - yes, absolutely.

So your point - ‘who’s to blame?’ is ceded.
As to what the root cause is, whole other subject.

Joe Trooper might commit a few war crimes, but his actions are a result of many things - poor morale, lack of oversight, poor discipline, poor leadership (e.g. by example) and a number of other things those in command take as a matter of course.
His actions - like the junkies - do not occur in a vaccum. The forces that lead to addiction are wide and varied. The environment that leads to crime is far more vast than some shakey junkie with a zip gun can estabilish on his own.

Your argument is one of individual responsibility. And is, in fact, quite correct.
It is limited however in that one may deal with any given criminal or group of criminals because of the great power of the state without addressing the root cause that gives rise to them. Without addressing the environment that ennables something harmful to arise. It is, to use a tired metaphor, treating the symptom without addressing the disease.

And indeed -this is exactly why we have so many people in prison. I’m the last person to argue for shorter sentencing or less harsh terms, but many people are in the penetentary for long stretches for cheap drug crimes (a couple Oz-es of cannabis does not, to my mind, a desperado make).

Given your “either/or” scenario, I’d take the junkie and the murderers simply because we can - and manifestly have - been dealing with them.
What we haven’t dealt with are the root causes of such behavior. I’ve said this before and it’s part of the reason I oppose the death penalty - it’s not enough to kill, you must eradicate and salt the Earth.
To stop kids from being killed in crossfires you don’t need to kill the shooters, and in fact you can’t kill them all. You do need to eradicate the conditions that gave rise to them and render barren the environment from which they spring.

It’s not about blame. (Anyone who picks up a gun looking to do harm is surely to blame.) But about diagnosis and elimination of the problem.
And that’s actually encountering more than a little resistance.
Even at the most elementary levels - f’rinstance there are folks with vested interests in high prison populations.

And you can’t kill them either. Hell, doesn’t even *look* like they’re doing anything wrong.
Meanwhile more kids are being driven into thinking the best way for them to succeed is to shoot some other kid.
Who’s fault is that? Theirs?

It’s not argued much because it’s tough to see and people like to think they are subject only to their own will. But we are also shaped by the environment we live in. Do a crime, kill someone, yes, that’s your fault.
But the responsibility for giving rise to the conditions that exist to create the criminals? No, some street junkie or pusher is nowhere near powerful enough to take the blame for that.
They exist because conditions for them to arise exist.
Eliminate the conditions, you eliminate them.
(Y’know, I make the same beef against terrorism, I get “kill ‘em all” answers. I’m not doubting your compassion or asserting your clarity is blurred edverb, nor comparing you to those ‘nuke ‘em’ folks - I’m merely remarking the pattern is the same - perhaps because it is such an emotionally charged issue and we want to assign blame. And indeed - you do, and rightly.
But having done more than my share of killing, I can say with absolute clarity: it don’t work. ‘Cause you can’t kill enough of them if the ground keeps giving rise to them. Hell, had I been smart enough I would have made the connection between the etiological myth of the origin of the Myrmidons and that whole concept and Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth - basically the ground being fertile in such a way to give rise to warriors. Would have saved myself a lot of trouble a long way back. I’m trying to save folks more trouble now.)
posted by Smedleyman at 10:20 AM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

And - I’ll add - confrontation with folks from an impoverished background, particularly in terms of education, but social confrontation in general, having higher expectations and demanding responsibility is a perfectly right way to think of things.
The problem is there is not only a lack of reciprocity for meritorious acts and work, but it’s often seen as “coddling” them.
As a result there’s no feeling of inclusion or investment in the system - whatever the reality is.

And that works both ways.
Conrad Black and other white collar criminals seem to feel they embody the system and everyone else, no matter how much they’ve earned, are outsiders.
I read a piece by Roger Ebert (who I’ve come to respect more and more) detailing an exchange between him and Black. Black’s sentiments were basically: “You should feel fortunate I was gracious enough to give you a job and pay you well.”
I mean Ebert is huge in the Sun Times and in Chicago. He’s like Royko was with the Trib. The man has earned his place at the table. Yet folks like Black feel perfectly justified in marginalizing him.

Consider then how Black might feel about some folks in the projects.

If Joe Thug is responsible for shooting someone, and he is, - how much responsibility then do the very wealthy and powerful bear for creating an environment of hopelessness and abandonment through their own corruption (and crimes, although an act need not be criminal to be corrupt) that results in thousands of murders each year?

If Joe Troop is responsible for raping and killing a civilian, and he is, - what then responsibility does Bush (and others) bear as the man who not only put him in Iraq, but put hundreds of thousands of others there as well and created the situation?

The blame problem is one of scope and practicality. We can hold Joe Thug responsible for his actions more easily than we can hold Joe S&LScandal responsible for his.
And the actions of Joe Thug are easier to point to as well. He shot someone and took their money. What happened in the S&L scandal?

Yet the S&L scandal did far, far more damage to far more lives than an army of thugs ever could.
posted by Smedleyman at 1:33 PM on January 25, 2008 [1 favorite]

"There's little money in assault, drug possession...."

No money in assault? Beat somebody up and steal their wallet, and you might have just made more than people make in several days in several minutes, with a temporary no-strings-attached credit card or two to boot.

No money in drug possession? You can fit a week's income into your pocket. You can fit a month's income in a backpack. Other people, the media, and - to an extent - the government, do your marketing for you. Distribution is a simple chore, when you're out there doing it, but you make money much faster than 7.50 an hour while you are.

People do these things because they -do- make money. They get caught because they aren't doing it -right-. The real money is in predatory lending, not assault and robbery... in pharmaceutical vending, not street pushing.
posted by tehloki at 2:52 PM on January 26, 2008