It’s not a spike. It’s a trend. Can you explain the decline from 1990 that’s taking crime levels back to where they were?
Probably the lead thing. If we were a country that suffered mainly from safecrackers, casino heists, bank heists, clever scams, and well thought out murders, then I’d say the country’s morals are going into the shitter. But in the real world we suffer from really stupid people doing really stupid things and getting caught, which would indicate that something is making people stupid. So lead works pretty well as an explanation, especially since things got better when kids grew up around less lead.
As for the welfare thing, welfare does reduce crimes of desperation, but probably increases crime overall since most crimes are not crimes of desperation in the Western world. Unless you count “I need to buy drugs” as desperation, which it is of a sort, but not the kind welfare can fix. Rape is never a crime of desperation. Vandalism is never a crime of desperation. Murdering someone for disrespecting you is also not a crime of desperation. What those crimes are is a lack of impulse control, which happens because of lead exposure, lack of parenting, lack of education, and being told that it’s not your fault that you’re a total loser.
There are studies that point that there is a connection indeed, seems that the ones that deny that those studies exist are usually only relying on right wing sources of information for that.
If poverty caused crime, then increases in poverty would cause increases in crime. That does not happen. There is no correlation.
It is true that poorer people are more likely to commit crimes, but that’s not caused by their poverty. It’s caused by the same mental and emotional traits that cause them to be in poverty. It’s also caused by a society eager to make things associated with poor people illegal, which makes them criminals even before they’ve developed bad intentions. Like drug use, public urination, panhandling, etc.
Sure, repeat the ignorance, it will work for a few but not for the ones that look at the evidence. Poverty remains a factor in crime. The research showed that neighbourhoods with the most crime tend to be those with the highest rates of poverty and other types of disadvantage.
And there is noting on what was reported that denies that. Many on the left side of the spectrum do point at those types of enforcements as part of the problem.
Not really, no. Workhouses and the Poor Law in force at the time were there to segregate, confine and profit from the poor, and treadmills, as already mentioned, were an outright punishment, not even charity.
The Poor Law in question, the New Poor Law, was set out specifically to counter the existing kind of charity that didn’t require confinement (the Old Poor Law, which was welfare, was an outdoor relief system), and, as Chadwick intended, to act as a deterrent to people claiming relief. That’s not welfare, that’s a Malthusian experiment, as the proponents were all too happy to relate.
Are you a politician?
Only the ones who are racists or bigots or troglodytes.
Metapolitics is the game we all play, even when we don’t think we are.
Spoken like a True Believer.
Yes, states passing concealed carry laws and tougher police enforcement.
So it’s OK for anyone to toss around ethnic slurs? Well, I guess that gives you and the OP an out, then…
As opposed to a Fake Believer? Guilty as charged.
…wait, was I supposed to be somehow ashamed of being a liberal? Ha!
Someone tell me I’m being whooshed, please.
“Poverty” as a social consideration is a lot more than just the school they attend, and the idea you can fix the problems of generations of poverty and the social conditions it builds with a few years of schooling is laughable.
But there’s something about the American psyche that really makes me think there’s no interest in ending poverty. It’s funny, you happily socialize spending for the military, the police, and the prison system, spending more on those than any comparable nation. But the idea of a social welfare safety net to stop people being born into conditions they will never be able to escape from is repugnant to a large number of the population there, probably a majority. People are keen to claim they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, so anyone else can, while just as keen to forget the relative advantages they started off with.
I mean, it’s possible that Construct’s post is an attempt at deep irony, but the odds are this is something he’s actually persuaded himself is true - that somehow the poor are inherently worse than he is.
It’s the tight correlation that seems so irrefutable to me. I haven’t actually seen it but I’ve read articles that say, in the crime data, you can differentiate the months in which different US states (cities being relevant) changed the law on lead.
Still feels like sci-fi.
Correlation does not mean causation. If there were causation then more poverty would mean more crime and less poverty would mean less crime. Look at the lead studies, more lead means more crime and less lead means less crime. That is a very good argument for causation.
I don’t think the lead crime link is dispositive. The studies I have seen have a 22 year lag time between lead levels and crime rates. That seems to long to me as most crime is committed between the ages of 16 and 25. Also homicide rates in Japan fell during the times of lead exposure unlike most of the rest of the world. Still I think it is probably a large factor in the drop in crime.
Workhouses as set up by the New Poor Law were welfare in that they were government spending on poor people to provide them with food and shelter. This could be just semantics in that I consider any government aid to the poor welfare and maybe you just consider outdoor relief as welfare.
My understanding is that treadmills were not just used in criminal prisons but also used in debtor’s prison as a way to work off the debt. This may not have been the case as the sources I have read seem opaque.
Depending on how you define it the US spends between $600 billion and 1 trillion dollars a year on welfare. That is many times the 75 billion dollar budget of the prison system, much more than the 173 billion spent on police and much more than the 500 billion spent on the military. If spending money could end poverty, poverty would already be ended.
The key point there being how it’s defined. So please elaborate.
Seconded. If that includes old-age benefits like Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance that aren’t what most people think of as “welfare”.