Given the number of social services and amount of support available, I highly doubt that even a sizeable minority of these crimes are survival-related.
- they require endless hoops to jump through (requirements for ID cards, citizenship, proving X years of residence in state/county or detailed financial or employment history when people often don't have the physical records any more)
- they require a bank account or a postal address (which is often hard to meet for homeless or the unbanked)
- they require a computer to fill out the application, excluding the elderly and analphabets without a support network like friends or family that help out
- require personal presence for the application at times where normal people have to work or at a place that cannot be reached by public transport
- the application processing takes many months, which leads to people not applying in the first place because why put in the effort if it will be in vain anyway
- successfully applying for the benefits prevents them from rising up in their jobs ("welfare cliff")
- successfully obtaining mental health care diagnosis and help prevents people from certain jobs or insurance
The system is set up in this perverted way so that politicians can say when faced with public pressure that there is a system in place, but don't have to actually set aside the money that it would cost to serve everyone who's theoretically eligible.
As a result, people turn to easier forms of making money instead: undocumented exploitative labor, prostitution or crime. And the latter two are a permanent source to feed the prison-industrial complex - it has been noted that should the cheap prison/slave labor go away, entire cities would collapse [1].
[1] https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2022/07/14...