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Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

I don’t agree with the statement the “crime is opportunistic,” that if you just remove the opportunity, you will remove the crime. That seems very, very narrow-sighted. I think a lot of theft crime comes from an absence of hope, no hope for better jobs, no hope for education, so why not? What stops a person from committing a crime? That’s really big big question, and I think when you have high poverty areas, high concentration of poverty, you encounter concentration of people who have no hope, no future, no jobs, no education, so why care? Steal. Anything to break the monotony seems worth the risk.

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I hear this repeated everywhere, but do you have any studies or numbers that back this up?

All I could find is this survey of ~40000 shoplifters. Although there's probably a bit of selection bias, they left out homeless people for example.

"However, it [shoplifting] was more common among those with higher education and income, suggesting that financial considerations are unlikely to be the main motivator for shoplifting in most cases."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104590/

Shoplifting and armed robbery are very different crimes.

Here's comprehensive crime stats from FBI for year 2019:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

There’s a whole gradient between total absence of hope and huge opportunity for committing a crime.

Not all criminals are completely hopeless and not all situations are lacking the opportunity to commit a crime.

If you are operating within the context of high opportunity for crime then reducing that opportunity for yourself will just drive the crime away from you. It doesn’t matter how hopeless the criminals are.

A lot of crime is opportunistic. You need to both know what you can exploit and also have some assurance there will be no repercussions.

Someone may always be looking for that opportunity, and it may be a lifestyle choice. But it is still opportunistic on an event level.

You clearly have spent no time around criminals, or as a guest of the criminal justice system. I have done both.

Nobody gives a shit about education. Nobody from the hood gives a fuck about your Stanford degree.

Why should you work for a living? You don't even keep your full paycheck: the government takes 25% right off the top. Don't argue that point, I worked in fast food.

Your honest job has no honor or glory. Nobody respects a cashier at McDonalds. You get shit on, all day long by the public, for next to nothing. But you get to see all those rich people on TV, all day long.

We value our lives not in absolute terms, but relative to the wealth we see around us.

Violence and exploitation get you both wealth and respect. Girls will fuck you for free drugs. And because you're hard. You throw down with the cops because you don't give a fuck. Nobody fucks with you, because you have a reputation.

"Tough on crime" won't fix this. Neither will social programs. Stupid has to hurt bad, and that just isn't palatable to polite society.

"Nobody respects a cashier at McDonalds" ---

I think THIS is the point: If we bring back (or better: establish) the mindset in the public, that any form of legal employment has its intrinsic honor ("I can life with the fruit of my own hands work", "workers pride" and so on) then i think the motivation for crime could go down...

McDonald’s very deliberately structured its workforce to be lower-skill and replaceable, even though it would be less expensive for them to hire skilled employees like short-order cooks. They did this very deliberately in order to make the company more resistant to labor organization efforts. When people say that McDonald’s jobs are low-status and replaceable, they’re reflecting the correct perception that these jobs were engineered to be low-status and replaceable. No amount of admonishing people is going to make humans admire a profession (the profession, not the people) that was designed this way.

IOW, they went out of their way to create more jobs than they otherwise would. Job deskilling is good for the most marginalized workers, even when those with valuable skills would oppose it.

Correct.

>Stupid has to hurt bad, and that just isn't palatable to polite society.

What does this actually mean from your POV?

Or maybe - just maybe! - behaving decently has to offer some level of comfort, safety, and status. Instead the folks who try to work face poverty wages, violence, and degrading work conditions.

Instead of trying to make people's lives even more miserable ("stupid has to hurt bad"), let's give them a path to a decent existence.

> Or maybe - just maybe! - behaving decently has to offer some level of comfort, safety, and status. Instead the folks who try to work face poverty wages, violence, and degrading work conditions.

Maybe.

> Instead of trying to make people's lives even more miserable ("stupid has to hurt bad"), let's give them a path to a decent existence.

When they have a decent existence some of them will start to think. And this shall not happen /s

"The masses could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly: but, since military and commercial rivalries are no longer of primary importance, the level of popular education is actually declining."

"The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of global society intact."

George Orwell - 1984

Legalize drugs so they are cheap and easily available, and then people will fuck you because they like you, not because you have the expensive drugs they want.

Actually, if you just legalize all the victimless crimes, making a living as a criminal is going to be a lot harder than just getting a job.

What if the gov gave anonymous "evacuation loans"? The target audience is teens in crime ridden neighborhoods that want to escape, but have no means to do so, and even if they tried, the immense peer pressure wouldnt let them. The loan would allow such teens to relocate anywhere in the US, with all expenses, including tution, paid. Upon graduating the loan would be forgiven. I admit, this idea may be a fantasy.

Edit. Your comment being downvoted confirms that the politically correct left doesn't want to listen.

What do you think someone in extreme poverty would want to throw away their local family and support network, in exchange for being an outcast somewhere else? Are you going to pay them $100K/yt until they build a new life?

> throw away their local family and support network

Why do you label this as "throwing away their local family", but you wouldn't label the millions of regular students studying overseas or interstate in the same way?

What about criminal mindset caused by criminal culture flourishing in such areas?

It's not "criminal culture" (often used as a dog whistle...), it's poverty culture https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2010/10/a-cultu...

> "If you are a young person living in an environment where violence is frequent and random, the willingness to meet any hint of violence with yet more violence is a shield."

Bingo. It's an entirely natural reaction to a violent environment. It's not the cause of the environment though, any more than GIs brawling during R&R caused the Vietnam War.

People are not robbing dollar stores because rap music told them to.

You’re saying the culture is just rap music and nothing else?

I'm saying blaming violence on "culture" sounds like a Republican dog-whistle for "poor black people deserve their fate". (And I'm not even American.)

Are there any instances of "criminal culture" flourishing in wealthy areas?

Or is "criminal culture" the byproduct of poverty and desperation?

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