Crime isn't caused by poverty. There is no correlation.
Crime was very low in the 50's, when poverty was much, much higher.
Crime was low during the Great Depression. We're talking about people so poor they were cooking thin soups over outdoor fires in ramshackle Hoovervilles. No explosion of criminality.
Think about your own family. Almost certainly, your great-grandparents were much poorer than you, but they were not more criminal, even though they lived with less material wealth than the poor urban neighborhoods of today's America. In many cases they had no electricity, or running water, and only the most basic healthcare. Yet they obeyed the law.
It's not poverty. Crime comes from the dysfunction in people and communities which stems from deeper causes which are much harder, or impossible to change.
I know that my grandparents sold booze illegally to bolster their income, my dad worked under the table a lot. Honestly how do you know how criminal anyone was in the 40s and 50s? Do you think they caught remotely as much theft, smuggling or tax evasion at a time when security cameras didn't exist? The state didn't even have a fraction of the capacity to trace lawbreaking that it has now.
When our great grandparents were around most cops probably didn't even have routine motorized patrols, who on earth even bothered to report a violent altercation during the Great Depression
No, it's the other way around. You can tell because many many communities now and in history have been highly functional while being broke, but every community full of criminals is broke (which is so obvious it sounds strange to even say).
This demonstrates that criminality/social dysfunction causes poverty, not the other way around.
Crime was very low in the 50's, when poverty was much, much higher.
Crime was low during the Great Depression. We're talking about people so poor they were cooking thin soups over outdoor fires in ramshackle Hoovervilles. No explosion of criminality.
Think about your own family. Almost certainly, your great-grandparents were much poorer than you, but they were not more criminal, even though they lived with less material wealth than the poor urban neighborhoods of today's America. In many cases they had no electricity, or running water, and only the most basic healthcare. Yet they obeyed the law.
It's not poverty. Crime comes from the dysfunction in people and communities which stems from deeper causes which are much harder, or impossible to change.