The “poverty is the root cause of crime” theory: Busted?

City Journal’s indispensable contributing editor Heather Mac Donald has an interesting piece published in the WSJ today in which she debunks the 60s-era rush to blame crime on poverty and “social injustice” by analyzing crime data from last year. Snippets:

The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.

The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.

[…]

And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.

The recession crime free fall continues a trend of declining national crime rates that began in the 1990s, during a very different economy. The causes of that long-term drop are hotly disputed, but an increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it. The number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2008, from 300,000 to 1.6 million.

As they say, read the whole thing. She does a great job of undercutting the rationale used by bleeding hearts starting in the 60s on the low income/crime link that really never was. Consider it another myth started in the 60s by intellectual elites to bolster their cases for bigger government busted.

If you’re interested in reading about more bogus liberal myths that emerged in the 60s that were used to justify more government intervention and forced “social justice,” read Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed. It will completely change the mindsets of any open-minded person who still hangs on to the believe that prominent liberal public figures and other various and assorted left wing “do-gooders” don’t massage and/or, in some cases, invent statistics in order to inject “change” into social and economic policy.

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