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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I don't think that poverty or inequality substantially explains crime, and a while ago a wrote a long post explaining why: https://devinhelton.com/inequality-crime

The most compelling evidence to me is just the existence of so many communities that are far poorer or more unequal than poor areas in America, while having extremely low rates of crime -- whether this be the slums of Edwardian England, post-war South Korea, Chinatown in old San Francisco, or the peasant areas of contemporary China. By any objective standards (such as calories and protein the average person can afford) these places were way poorer than the ghetto in a modern American city. Yet the crime rates were below that of modern America as a whole.

The second most compelling branch of evidence is the failure of policy based on the "poverty causes crime" thesis. We have foodstamps, government housing, and formerly had "general assistance" specifically to pull people out of the worst of poverty. And these public housing buildings became notorious for extreme high rates of crime, worse crime than is recorded in many far more impoverished areas.

Any link between poverty and crime is probably mostly the inverse -- the prevalence of anti-social habits and behaviors that create high-crime, also make for bad employees and make a community a bad place to build wealth.

I don't think simple "studies" will ever convince anyone, as I show in my post, there can always be accusations of confounders and cherry-picking. One actually has to make an attempt to read a variety of quantitative and qualitative sources and really try to understand the world.

One sophistic tactic I see in this debate, is to abuse the word "poverty." So people will admit that there are many food-poor populations will have low crime, but say that "poverty" is much more than that. For instance the UN defined poverty as:

Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and cloth[e] a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living on marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation.”

Note that "susceptibility to violence", ie crime, gets baked into the definition of poverty, so the link between crime and violence becomes tautological!

Note that by making the definition of poverty basically "all bad things", it becomes a great blender where any bad thing gets linked to poverty and then pretty much any NGO or government agency that has a mandate to tackle some specific issue is also addressing poverty. So the argument becomes, if you want to address crime, just expand the budget for all the things that the government is doing ...

whether this be the slums of Edwardian England

Which were an improvement upon their predecessors, the rookeries of London. There was a concerted public campaign of private benevolent do-goodery, social agitation, the government instituting slum clearance policies, and an improvement in the economy which helped alleviate poverty somewhat:

At their zenith, they were a problem that seemed impossible to solve, yet eventually they did decline. Changes in the law, the growing effectiveness of the police, slum clearances, and perhaps the growing prosperity of the economy gradually had their effect.

Comparing Edwardian slums to 21st century inner city American ghettos is also not comparing like-with-like. For instance the claim that increased policing made crime rates drop:

Violent crime was not as much of a concern in 1901 as it is today and was seen as falling. A report by the Criminal Registrar, published in 1901, noted that the period had 'witnessed a great change in manners: the substitution of words…for blows…an approximation in the manners of different classes; a decline in the spirit of lawlessness'. This was partly due to policing: the historian V.A.C. Gatrell has argued, in his article in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, that the Edwardian working classes were heavily regulated and that the falling indictable crime rate between 1860 and 1914 reflected a period when policing was able to obtain 'a peculiar and transient advantage…over ancient forms of popular lawlessness visible on the street'.

And imprisonment rates ≠ crime rates:

In 1901, imprisonment was the commonest form of punishment; at the time this could involve hard labour. 199,875 people were sent to prison in 1901, nearly 75% of whom were men. Statistics for 1900 show that 52% of those convicted of indictable offences were sent to prison, a proportion that would fall to 18% by 1950, but rise again to 23% in 1998. Fines were imposed on 22% of such offenders in 1900 and a further 9% were punished by whipping.

In 1901, juvenile offenders could be sent to reformatories or industrial schools (replaced by borstals in 1908). Stockport Industrial School admitted 32 children aged between 9 and 13 in 1901 for offences such as 'frequenting company of reputed thieves'; 'beyond [parental] control; 'larceny'; 'found habitually wandering and not under proper control'; 'stealing rabbits'; 'non-attendance [at school]'; and 'refractory in workhouse'.

And what types of crime are we measuring? And how, and by whom, are they prosecuted?

Crime, 1780-1925

As with all periods in history, there were many illegal acts which could, if detected (and the perpetrator was prosecuted) appear as "crimes". However, the vast majority of crimes were never prosecuted. Modern historians can sometimes study unprosecuted acts of violence or theft, but this is more difficult for historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many acts we would describe as crimes today - sexual predation or domestic violence, for instance - were largely unprosecuted before the mid-nineteenth century, as were many minor property offences. We cannot, therefore, estimate the number of domestic violence incidents that took place. In fact, we can only determine the number of prosecuted crimes from 1856 onwards, when annual statistics were published.

The vast majority of crimes prosecuted between 1780 and 1925 were property offences, and many of these offences, including larceny, pickpocketing, burglary, and robbery, changed little. But there are some significant differences in the commission of crime and the apprehension of offenders that took place over the period covered.

So, the numbers and types of crimes that were prosecuted relied on an active victim who was determined to take the cases to court. We have to remember that victims of crime had many options. They could come to terms with the perpetrator, and accept money in damages or compensation (a process known as compounding). Employers could sack workers who stole their workplace materials. Victims of assault could use physical retribution themselves; violent husbands could be subject to "Rough Music" (community sanctions) in their neighbourhood.

The crimes that did not make it into court tell us as much as the crimes that did, but it is the latter which the evidence forces us to focus on. We can see what kinds of crimes people thought were worth prosecution, and who brought those cases to court. Unfortunately, this tends to skew our view of the type and amount of crimes that predominated. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the government published annual crime statistics. Although these were deeply flawed, it is possible to see how crime (or prosecution) trends were presented, and determine why the Victorian State and the general public reacted to apparent outbreaks of crime at particular times.

The years between the 1880s and 1930 has been characterized as the era of the “Policeman State” by Vic Gatrell (1992). Over this time, the police slowly grew to exert a powerful influence over recorded crime through the centrality of their role in the detection and prosecution process. They effectively replaced the victim in court, taking the main role as both the apprehenders and prosecutors of criminality. This affected prosecutions for violence, especially, and they fell dramatically. For example, in England and Wales, assault prosecutions fell from about 75,000 in 1870 to just over 22,000 by 1930. The much-vaunted English miracle of reducing violent crime was, more likely, a function of the changes in the way offenders were brought to court.

If violent crime did appear to be falling, it did not prevent the public (or the newspapers) reporting on a number of crime-related panics in the mid- to late nineteenth century.

Thus, when you are looking at "crime rates in Edwardian England" and comparing them with "crime rates in US ghetto", you are comparing a period which was the result of what had been a sustained and prolonged effort to reduce crime, the rise of an increasingly professional police force, changes in prosecution, changes in imprisonment, and the general social and economic improvements. In other words, the "after" photo in a "before and after" comparison.

Thus, when you are looking at "crime rates in Edwardian England" and comparing them with "crime rates in US ghetto", you are comparing a period which was the result of what had been a sustained and prolonged effort to reduce crime, the rise of an increasingly professional police force, changes in prosecution, changes in imprisonment, and the general social and economic improvements.

That is my point -- policing, prosecution, along with general morality and habits instilled by family and community -- is what matters for crime. The level of material well-being matters much less, if at all, it is rounding error compared to other factors.

Sure, but that is not the same as "District A has income of $10,000 per family, District B has income of $15,000 per family. District B is better-off compared to District A, but District A has a lower crime rate, therefore poverty is not the reason".

If crimes are not being reported in District A, then the true rate is higher. If there are more cops on beat patrol in District A, then there is a disincentive to commit crime. If District A is newly built council housing and District B is an uncleared slum, same. A lot of factors can go into "District A has less crime than District B". Think of the infamous bike cuck cartoon - if people in San Francisco no longer bother reporting bike theft, car break-ins, shoplifting and the like, then simply looking at 'reported rates' or 'arrests made' could lead someone in the future to think "One hundred years ago, San Francisco had less crime than modern Brownville" (if they didn't have access to all the media about how crime is running rampant, etc.)

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