Poverty, employment prospects, and the opportunity cost of crime

Poverty and Crime

The connection between poverty and crime has been observed by many throughout the course of human civilization. These observations, however, have been often vague and simplistic. For example, many religious doctrines attribute the two outcomes to a common defect in an individual's character, such as the Christian admonition against sloth and greed. More recent discussions, which can be termed under Social Darwinism, attempted to attribute poverty and criminality among certain groups of people to both the genetic makeup and culture of a particular racial or ethnic group.

Recent observations have focused less on personal and cultural factors and more on structural factors. Explanations examining structural factors are undoubtedly more useful for scholars and policymakers than those examining individual or cultural factors. However, the actual mechanisms by which poverty promotes crime is still unclear.

A number of studies in the field of sociology, economics, and criminology provide insight into the specific mechanisms through which poverty promotes crime. Thesis: As one spends more time outside of the mainstream labor force, one's employment and career prospects dwindle, often making criminal activity the most accessible and lucrative form of income available to the individual, who feels that he/she is leaving behind very little when entering the world of illicit criminal activity.

1) Notably how does being poor and having less access to quality jobs/education causes an individuals opportunity cost for crime to also lower.

Opportunity Cost

The opportunity cost for crime is determined by the opportunities that the person would have to forgo in order to engage in criminal activity. If the person engages in fairly regular criminal activity and relies solely on criminal activity for income, that person misses an opportunity to acquire the education and skills required for a quality job or career of some sort. The person also fails to develop the basic soft skills which are expected for entry into the workforce.

Because one's employment and career is expected to follow a steady progression, gaps in one's progress severely hinder one's ability to find a quality job later in life and thus one's overall socioeconomic position. Thus, the initial diminished access to quality jobs and education is often the start of a vicious cycle where one's career prospects steadily grow worse from one's absence from the workforce.

More importantly, there are additional opportunities foregone when a person is caught for a crime. A criminal record greatly limits employment opportunities, for instance. Imprisonment itself deprives the person of time that could have been spent acquiring education and skills that would make the person competitive for decent-paying jobs.

Government Intervention and the Movement between Mainstream Employment and Illicit Employment

In Zhao's "Dynamics of Poverty and Crime," the flow of impoverished individuals between the licit and illicit worlds is understood through a mathematical model. In Zhao's model, the population is divided into five sub-classes: the non-impoverished class N, the poverty class P, the criminal class C, the jailed class J, and recovered class (from jail or from impoverished class) R. (Zhao, 227). The model assumes that there is a certain probability that a person in the P. class will resort to crime after coming into contact with a criminal. (227).

Zhao found that there is an optimum government intervention level for each given crime level at which the cost of controlling crime is at a minimum. (233). In the context of Hall and Maclean's comparative study of social welfare spending and crime rates, Zhao's study can be very useful for neoliberal economies such as the United States in determining what level of social welfare and investment spending is necessary to reach an particular level of criminal activity.

2) Also Is there a "cultural" link that promotes low growth in the development within poor neighborhoods which causes a "cycle" of unemployment and poverty related crimes?.

It is often suggested that broader cultural factors or a cultural link is responsible for promoting crime within poor neighborhoods. However, there is no substantial empirical evidence in the aforementioned studies for the existence of such cultural factors. Albeit the quantitative nature of these studies makes it difficult to identify the influence of soft cultural factors, though not impossible. In Nikulina's study, "The Role of Childhood Poverty in Predicting Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Major Depressive Order, Academic Achievement, and Crime in Young Adulthood.," Nikulina studied the predictive effect of childhood neglect, childhood family poverty, and childhood neighborhood poverty on adult arrest. Nikulina found that although childhood neglect and childhood family poverty uniquely predicted adult arrest, childhood neighborhood poverty did not have the same predictive effect.

In Nikulina's study, the childhood neighborhood poverty measure is the closest metric one could find in identifying representing cultural factors. The metric was used to measure the effect that growing up within a particular community had on a child's likelihood of adult arrest. In other words, it is meant to measure the influence of neighborhood culture on adult arrest. Nikulina found that it did not have a significant predictive effect for adult arrest and found that childhood family poverty and childhood neglect, more personal factors than cultural factors, hold far greater predictive effect for adult arrest.

It should be noted that Nikulina's study does not necessarily mean that there are no cultural factors or cultural link involved in the interplay between poverty and crime. It is more than likely that there are cultural factors at play. However, there are two main pitfalls in the discussion of such soft cultural factors. The first pitfall is that soft factors such as culture are very hard to quantify and thus difficult to pin down in the type of quantitative research currently in vogue in the field of social sciences. There will have to be more qualitative research done, including interviews, questionairres, and polls conducted in order to get a handle on the factors which transform poverty into crime. The second pitfall is that culturally-focused explanations often echo the racial prejudices which drove the Social Darwinist explanations of poverty and crime during the late 19th and early 20th century sociology and criminology.

Conclusion

The relationship between poverty and crime is only beginning to be fleshed out in a manner which will produce useful policy recommendations. Fortunately, these recommendations will be grounded in quantitative research, especially data regarding crime rates and social welfare expenditures. However, it is important that research into poverty and crime does not become overly enamored with quantitative research, as there are many soft factors and dynamics at work which can only be identified through qualitative research.