 | abichara (60)
12/09/2006 | On its own, of course poverty doesn't cause crime. Poverty might be a mitigating circumstance: drug use, desperate poverty, and weak social institutions all come together to form high crime rates. Plenty of lower income people work hard and do so honestly. Why then should they be categorized as criminals?
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 | DrEntropy (38)
04/30/2006 | Mencken at his best. Most poor people are decent and honest, despite doing exhausting, thankless work for bare subsistence (there is a good portrait of the working poor in Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed-the best work of investigative journalism I've read in years). The poor are also far more likely to be prayed upon by criminals than the middle class or the rich. Crime is caused by many things: illegitimacy, culture, inequality, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, testosterone...Unless poverty is truly desperate, or it is combined with one of the factors above, it rarely leads to crime; and associating poverty with crime really is a kind of slander.
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