Relationships between poverty and violent crime, specifically children growing up in poor households, have been well known for a very long time and the relationship continues to be shown repeatedly. See e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS2468-2...
> I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said "I saw something once, so the entire history of collected statistics must be wrong" I'd be very rich. It happens in China too. See for instance https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The only real questions are about specific actionable causes and why crime can still go up even when overall average poverty goes down.
On the other hand, crime went down a lot, across the board, in 2009 despite the recession. <https://newrepublic.com/article/80316/relationship-poverty-c...>
West Virginia, among the poorest of US states, has a crime rate well below average.
"Your honor, I was so broke that I raped someone"
Also, the specific connection with crime and poverty inequality, not poverty itself.
Honduras is a good example. It was once poor and relatively peaceful. With a few social incidents, like removing farmers from their land and the rise of the drug trade, you have violence. The drug trade displays wealthy narcos to young men whose other choice is to be a poor laborer. The men see that those with money get the girls, can support their families, have status.
In my experience, especially in South America, the twin forces of poverty and civic dysfunction produce desperation - and that seems the driving force behind the sorts of “crime in the streets” that gets headlines.
Of course in other places on the same continent corruption (narco, mining, logging, etc) produce violent crime that plays out quite differently.
I've read of accounts by two different Western women who hitchhiked alone across China in perfect safety. One cannot imagine this happening in any other BRICS country except maybe parts of pre-Ukraine War Russia.