Poverty and Crime Term Paper

An association between poverty and crime in term papers has long been assumed.  Karl Marx implied this relationship when he suggested that crime was the inevitable result of economic class struggle.  In 1862, Victor-Marie Hugo published his famous Les Misèrables, the story of Jean Valjean, who was sent to prison for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving sister and her family.  The basic assumption that Hugo and others have made is that when an individual lacks the funds to secure those items necessary to sustain life, he or she will become involved in crime in order to obtain them.

However, term papers demonstrate that the relationship between crime and poverty is not that simple.  There are several factors that affect this complex relationship in various ways, and so the predictions that follow from an overly simplistic theory are often inaccurate.  For example, the idea that poverty causes crime would imply that all poor people will commit crimes, given the necessity and the opportunity.  This suggestion is obviously false; there are many poor people who never commit crimes.  Conversely, many economically advantaged individuals do commit crimes.  The intuitive assumption that poverty causes crime might also suggest that the only criminal acts correlated with poverty would be those resulting in increased money or goods.  Yet this is not the case.

A logical off-shoot of the theory that people subjected to
impoverished living conditions are more likely to commit crimes might be that criminal behavior is the result of living in these conditions for long periods of time.  So, the question becomes, for what length of time must an individual live in impoverished conditions before he or she becomes more likely to commit a crime?  Possibly, individuals subjected to relatively short periods of unemployment may be more likely to commit crimes than those for whom financial difficulties are ongoing and seem hopeless.  And again, participation in criminal activity for these individuals may not be limited to cases in which money or goods are acquired, but may also include aggressive acts such as murder.

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