Violent Crime: Relationship between Poverty and Crime (Essay Sample)

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Student Name Articles on Violent Crime
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Relationship between Poverty and Crime
In United States, crime exist everywhere both in rural areas and urban settings. Due to this, officials have come up with various hypotheses to explain the causes of these incidents especially in urban areas so as to come up with a lasting solution. Some of the major factors that contribute to crime in United States of America include unemployment, high population, age diversity and the location. However poverty level has been identified as the most contributing factor to different types of crimes in the United States. When other factors are kept constant, it can be easily be determined how poverty affects crime.
There are various reasons that can be used to explain the effect of poverty on crime. It is believed that poor people suffer from thinking problem compared to rich people CITATION Bri07 \l 1033 (Brill, 2007). These make poor people to suffer from stress which forces them to commit crime such as robbery and other major violent actions. Poverty also may lead to inferior perception towards education making young people from very poor families not able to access quality schools, jobs and other important information hence reducing opportunity cost of violent crime. It also raises chances of them roaming in the streets forming gangs which involves in different kinds of crime.
In addition to that, crime normally provides way to poor people to access things they desire but they are not able to obtain them in a legal way. When these poor people are threatened by authority, it makes them obtain even a lot of extra goods through violent acts such as robbery which is among the top most violent crimes committed in the United States. Poor people also believe that they rewards that criminal acts bring offset the danger of them being caught. From the experiment conducted using census from the 1977 to 1998 it was found that coefficient of poverty is very significant. The regression indicated that a slight increase in population of about one percent who are below poverty line will lead to an increase in crime up to about 135 total crime and 24 violent crimes. From these experiments it can be stated that poverty increases the rate of crime. Another study CITATION Lud10 \l 1033 (Ludwig, Jens, Greg J. Duncan, and Paul Hirschfield, 2010. ), shows that young people living in areas with high level of poverty commits more violent crime than when they are moved to moderate poverty areas. They also said that areas with high poverty have high rate of violent crime but little rate of property crime than in low or moderate poverty areas.
Relationship between Education and crime
Many research conducted in different states in USA has indicated that crime rates are fewer in areas where people are educated. It is believed that education makes people to be more patients CITATION Bek07 \l 1033 (Beker and Muhigan, 2007). This discourages criminal activities since people focus on future expectation and punishment that they may get if found performing violent acts. Education also makes people not to be involved in ...