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The Labor Market and The Crime Market

In The Gift of Fear, Gavin De Becker writes about causes of violence and predicting them. Gavin writes about bad childhood spawning violent criminals and about how disgruntled employees or stalkers can come to be violent. However, he mentions little about a major predictor of crime: economic desperation.
Although some dispute it, I believe that economic desperation is the biggest factor in people turning to crime. Some say that the evidence doesn’t back this up; but I have found the sentiment to be not only backed by logic, but by statistics as well. Nevertheless, those who argue in contradiction to my thesis use the same sources of information that I do.
The conservative think tank known as the Heritage Foundation alleges that just because crime dropped during the Clinton years and the economy grew strongly at the same time doesn’t mean that crime rates and the economy are connected. The Heritage Foundation sites old crime records from 1934 to 1938 when the economy was supposedly bad but crime had dropped (leaving out that prohibition ended in 1933). They also pointed out economic expansion and crime expansion at the same time from 1955 to 1972 (Ignoring the effects of the Vietnam War and the draft).
The Heritage foundation attacks a book written by a UCLA professor called “The Crime Drop in America”. According to the book the decrease in crime is the result of the following factors: better policing, community policing, the decline of crack cocaine use, the increase in legitimate sources of income, changing demographics, the dramatic increase in the incarceration rate, and the aging of baby boomers, who are now out of the high-crime age. Despite all of these factors the book talks about, the Heritage Foundation makes it out to seem as if the only factor the book gives is economics. Then it “disproves” that the unemployment rate and crime rate are connected by showing that they didn’t synchronize from 1982 to 1984 and from 1988 to 1990. Finally, the Heritage foundation offers the following 3 reasons for the crime drop from 1992 to 2000: America’s prison capacity quadrupled since the 1970s, more and better police officers working with community groups, and the changing demographic of the number of 16 to 24 year old males. Of course the Heritage Foundation made it sound as if those were their independent ideas, and that the book they attacked made no mention of them. My guess is they did it because conservatives have this thing about attacking college professors.
When I gathered information from FBI uniform crime reports I found they only went back to 1979. Nonetheless when I used Microsoft excel sheets to graph the national crime index total and to graph the percent of people living under the poverty line, I found the graphs to for the most part coincide. It should be noted that it is not the lack of jobs that necessarily turns one to crime, it is a lack of money. Perhaps between 1982 and 1984 unemployed people were able to get by on other means than crime.
It is true that the Heritage Foundation was making the case that a better economy doesn’t mean lower crime rates; not that poverty does not lead to crime. However, one can reason that one wouldn’t turn to crime because the GDP was down or the national debt was up, they would do it because they are desperate for money. As we have seen in recent years, the economy can be going up but if the only ones who benefit from the new growth are huge corporations, than that doesn’t get rid of desperate people. Although in recent years we have been able to pacify the suffering with a flood of new low-pay jobs to replace those lost over the last 5 years. It would be more accurate to say that unemployment can lead to poverty, which can lead to crime. That is not to say one could not have a low paying job and still be in poverty.
To cut down on crime one must cut down on the illegal options that the poor have for making money. After prohibition ended in 1933, crime dropped by one-third by 1938. After our modern day prohibition on drugs ends that will take away the biggest source of income for criminals. The poor would no longer have the option of turning to drug running to get by in a pinch.
If we stopped the drug war, that would give us another 18 billion dollars a year to fight poverty. If we allowed companies to produce and sell now illegal drugs, we could impose regulations and tax them much like we do with tobacco, and use such taxes to fight poverty. South American drug runners, some terrorists, and crime lords all depend on the drug war and without it they would be out of luck.
Almost everybody in our over crowded prison system is there on drug charges. Not having enough prisons to hold them all, we are forced to let many go way before their sentences are up. This puts all manner of criminal back on the street, costs us about $450,000 per drug sentence with about 1.5 million people sentenced on drug charges, and costs us in new prison construction.
All of this makes the police officer’s job a much more dangerous one. Faced with the prospect of going to prison many that are forced to do drug trade to get by will shoot officers attempting to arrest them. Plenty of drug lords with Teflon coated bullets will not hesitate to gun down an officer, but there can be no drug lords with out the drug war. Those officers should be going after rapists, murderers, pimps, and arsons instead.
Also, it is about time we increase the federal minimum wage. One can barely live on $5.15 an hour, and that no doubt tempts them towards crime. The minimum wage needs to be adjusted for inflation, and increased a buck. Research shows that a one-dollar an hour increase would not force many employers to downsize. However, last time the subject came to congress it was shot down by the Republicans who told us it would force many people to be laid off. Essentially we had the rich telling us it was in our best interest to keep the poor poor. I say it is not in our best interest to have poor and desperate people in our society. As long as we have desperate people, we will have crime.