Poverty

Over the last century, the existence of high levels of crime and disorder among the most economically deprived classes has been a common theme in social science research. Today, there is a common belief among the general public that a dangerous class of people living in poor, deteriorating neighborhoods in cities are responsible for most of the crime and deviance in our cities. Although this belief is exaggerated (crime occurs throughout the class structure and is not confined to low-income communities), there is a strong association between poverty and crime. One might argue that the relationship between poverty and crime is largely a phenomenon of the advanced Western world; many desperately poor nations in the Eastern Hemisphere, for example, have relatively low crime rates. Poverty—the absence of the material goods needed to sustain healthy lives and minimal well-being—is most commonly associated with street crime. Street crimes are those law violations that are seen by the general public as most serious and include murder, assault, sexual assault and rape, and personal property crimes.

Crime scholars have expended considerable energy trying to understand the link between economic conditions like poverty and extreme inequality and crime, because of the obvious policy implications related to this issue. That is, if poverty and inequality cause serious crime, crime-reduction strategies must include efforts to reduce economic deprivation. Efforts to understand the poverty-crime link have accelerated in recent decades when both crime and poverty in America's inner cities increased sharply. Over 12 million children currently live in poverty in the United States. The majority of these children will grow up in urban centers where crime and other signs of social breakdown (e.g., joblessness, family disruption, drug and alcohol addiction) are disproportionately high. Finding effective social interventions to meet the needs of poor families continues to be an important policy concern today.

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Definition of Poverty

Poverty is the condition of economic deprivation characterized by an insufficiency of resources with which to procure the economic goods and services needed for basic subsistence. These goods and services include food, housing, medical care, clothing, and transportation. In 1964, the U.S. Social Security Administration constructed the first poverty index, which has been revised and reconstructed periodically over time. The poverty index is used by federal agencies to set a “poverty line” in order to determine which families and individuals reside below acceptable standards of living. Families and individuals who are judged to be below the poverty line are then made eligible to receive the benefits of federal programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food stamps, housing, and medical assistance. Public assistance is usually referred to broadly as “welfare.” Although many poor families and individuals draw income both from welfare and from paid employment, there is a substantial group of persons, called the “working poor,” who draw income exclusively from full-time paid labor but, nonetheless, continue to live in circumstances of serious deprivation.

Illustration from the nineteenth-century novel Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. Here, the homeless and hungry orphan, Oliver, falls in with a gang of thieves, who offer him food and try to make him one of them.

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