Why do poor people commit more crime? | Hacker News Reader

Why do poor people commit more crime?

marginalrevolution.com

19 pointscubefox84 comments

>> One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. [...] Or, poorer people face greater strains

>> [or there's a] third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness

Or... the consequences of being prosecuted for crime are heavily weighted towards taking away things you have: freedom, luxury, wealth.

If you don't have any of those things, because you're poor, the relative consequences for getting caught decrease.

Consequently, there's less of a disincentive to avoid crime, especially if it offers you a way to get ahead.

Rich people have a lot that can be taken by the state in retaliation. Poor people, notsomuch.

I think the idea that relatively rich people have more to lose is important.

Age is also a factor. I worked retail in high school and then office jobs the rest of my life. When I worked retail, half the teen males I worked with were stealing merchandise from the store we worked at. In my 20 years of office work, with all the electronic surveillance of our behavior, I have encountered maybe 2 person I worked with that was crime adjacent.

If you are a 17 year old male making $5/hr hourly in precarious employment, then stealing a $500 electronic device is an interesting proposition, it's also an 80x return.

If you are a married adult supporting your family making $200k in steady employment, then stealing some office equipment or falsifying invoices is a lot riskier of a proposition, and for what?

You’d be surprised how many techies making $200k a year will engage in insider trading. The first few cases I heard about were just shocking, because they are very likely to get caught, and their lives ruined.

I've seen assertions like this before but I think it still falls into the opportunity set theory.

The frequency that someone making $200k in a tech firm finds out information that is material and that can give them a return worth risking $200k job, is rather low. Especially in comparison to the daily opportunity to commit crimes on the scale of $100-1000 if you are making minimum wage. So the frequency of temptation is lower the higher your income, I would argue.

>You’d be surprised how many techies making $200k a year will engage in insider trading

Well, how many? The US is a big country, so you're going to be able to come up with dozens of cases even if the base rate is minuscule.

I was just surprised about the number of actual cases I was aware of. It is anecdotal, but I otherwise would not thought it was common enough to know of one incident, let alone multiple ones.

I guess the people who do this simply don’t know better, and are used to developing world stock markets where the rules are very different from here. The insider trading training corps push is actually useful for informing people how different it is here.

Heard a very similar argument around suicide. People with more education and wealth seem to commit suicide greater than those without. So much of State, so much to lose, so much invested, it's like having the rug pulled out from under you I guess.

Same argument for why immigrants tend to commit less crime.

Being here is the opportunity of a lifetime and risking it is rarely worthwhile.

Isn't this rejected by the study. If poor people have less to lose, then why doesn't the data show that increasing their wealth reduces their crime rate? If they are awarded more money, then they have more to lose, yet their rate is crime forward but decrease according to this study, no?

Because they didn't invest time and effort in the means to acquire that wealth, which is the thing most wealthy people are truly afraid to lose.

Professional licensing (e.g. MD), social network and reputation, political power.

Giving someone even a lot of cash doesn't tie them to "the system" in the way that those things do.

It is kind of ironic how people don't understand how deterrence works. They think being tough on crime means more deterrence, but realistically those people leave prison one day, with less to lose and the deterrence effect disappears for good.

Also people misunderstand how deterrence works. In that if you double the sentence people don't fear it twice as much.

Especially when conviction rates are as low as they are, "getting caught is something that happens it other people, it could never happen to me, I'm too smart"

I've read studies that suggest that high detection/conviction rates and relatively mild punishments is the ideal.

Agreed. Convicts having difficulty finding solid jobs seems... words fail me idiotic.

It's absolutely ridiculous, and a complete byproduct of a vengeful society. It is rare that a politician can run on a platform that is in favor of prison reform. They will be branded as soft on crime. Every politician has to be tough on crime, tough on evil doers, and citizens expect harsh punishments. It's almost like a vicarious executioner. Rehabilitation is what we need more than anything, not more prisons, not longer jail sentences, rehabilitation.

Or leaving prison with existing or new substance abuse problems. Prison is the only environment that can realistic force treatment and abstinence. The lack of jobs, job training, substance abuse problems, and often burnt bridges with friends and family means they are in a bus to some east or west coast city after they get out, with nowhere to stay.

That still falls under the first set.

"It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime."

No, this is only for certain types of crime. The amount of money stolen via income tax evasion, financial crimes... by the well off is massively, massively greater than the total amount stolen by the poor via shoplifting and other theft crimes.

>The amount of money stolen via income tax evasion, financial crimes... by the well off is massively, massively greater than the total amount stolen by the poor via shoplifting and other theft crimes.

But the article is talking about "more crime", not "more money stolen" or similar. I think most people would agree that there's "more crime" happening when 100 people each steal $5 worth of candy bar from a store, than if a single person failed to report ~$2000 worth of income, and is therefore evading $500 worth of taxes.

I read it implicitly as "violent" and "petty" crime. I'm fairly certain there's a bias against "breaking the rules" vs "exploiting the rules" in this discussion.

Many financial crimes are just that, 'crimes', not exploiting the rules, not bending them, but flat out breaking them. There is also a big difference between 'petty' (e.g. shoplifting, loitering) and 'violent' (e.g. mugging, school shooting,...)

Did you really misunderstand what I meant? or, perhaps you really are trying to help me edit to make my point? Or perhaps you disagree with the sentiment and are finding details to disagree with? This comment type is confusing.

It is well known that the crimes committed by poor people are prosecuted more consistently and more frequently than the complicated white-collar crimes committed by wealthier people.

Spot on - and this doesn't only apply to white collar crime - the wealthy are overwhelmingly more likely to escape prosecution for any crime.

Whether through having resources to get off (legitimately or illegitimately), or just cultural bias (Eg. The mere existence of terms like "white-collar crime")

It’s not really well known. We’ve almost stopped prosecuting any petty crime at all in some jurisdictions (so it’s like shoplift till you drop). AG’s and county DA’s, on the other hand, make it a point to pursue white collar crime very aggressively, and whenever the Feds are involved (eg for insider trading), they are very aggressive. The issue with white collar crime, is that it is simply very hard to identify, while the guy walking out of Target with a basketful of stuff while avoiding checkout is just really obvious.

It is also a matter of incentives. The only thing goin after most shoplifters will get the state is having to fund their court appearances and incarceration, a net loss. Going after a rich guy for a crime nets them real money, so when they can they definitely will do it (at least where I live, your locale will differ).

That people commit shop-lifting and other minor crimes with impunity is a right-wing meme that has very little basis in reality. It's being pushed by grifters with a financial interest in promoting the idea of societal decay and disorder and getting people worked up and afraid.

>That people commit shop-lifting and other minor crimes with impunity is a right-wing meme that has very little basis in reality

How do you square this against DAs that openly state they won't prosecute such crimes?

You have data showing decreasing prosecution rates for such crimes, or is this selective reporting of what a few DAs (of the many thousands in this country) said?

Vibes vibes vibes.

So if you're being held up at gunpoint, what's going to be your response? "Well ackshually the chances of being robbed is less than 0.1% per year, so the idea that I'm being victimized is a right-wing meme that has very little basis in reality"? The fact that DAs in Mississippi are oppressing shoplifters is cold comfort to a storeowner in NY, LA, Dallas, St. Louis[1], SF[2], or Portland[3]. And that's just the jurisdictions I could turn up in a 2 minute google search.

[1] https://www.apainc.org/choosing-not-to-prosecute-low-level-c...

[2] https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/data-shows-chesa-boudin-...

[3] https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/the-story/multnomah-d...

Not a right winger watching FauxNews, just a moderate (somewhat left of center). But when you see shoplifting happening multiple times a week, where the store worker or security guard is saying “would you please pay for that?” It’s obvious something is out of control.

And where's the data?

Like here is the larceny-theft rate from 1990 to 2022.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191247/reported-larceny-...

This suggests shoplifting is down since 2018 in a large number of cities.

https://www.statista.com/chart/31272/number-of-shoplifting-i...

Again, vibes are manipulated by selective highlighting of specific examples of outrageous behavior. It's often done because certain people profit from your feeling that things are falling apart around you.

Reporting of shoplifting to the police is down for sure, since the police aren’t doing anything about it, there is no reason to report it. How does QFC report something that happens hourly, when they are understaffed already and those reports can only be taken over a phone that is unlikely to be answered, since the police are also understaffed? Petty crime reporting is notoriously noisy, the only reliable crime statistic is homicide (it is actually illegal to not report a murder).

so you don't have data is what i am hearing.

And your data is incomplete, so? We have police chiefs here begging people to report crime since they need it for decent statistic is even if they can’t act on it.

It’s almost certainly true that the most commonly committed crime is tax evasion, with drug use as another contender. Neither are particularly confined to the lower incomes.

Is tax evasion distributed differently by income level? How do you control for it just being more complicated to file as income increases? My experience in the lower rungs is that middle class people pay taxes faithfully out of great fear of consequences for not doing so, while lower income and poor friends often cheat or don’t bother with taxes at all (or bank accounts for that matter). I’ve met and known tax cheats but none of them white color workers. I would love to see data. I would predict a u shape, with tax evasion lowest in the middle, and higher for both low income blue color workers (including waitresses), and higher for the upper classes and those who own homes, other major wealth.

>My experience in the lower rungs is that middle class people pay taxes faithfully out of great fear of consequences for not doing so

It's also pretty hard not to pay taxes if you're getting most of your income through employment, since your employer is obligated to withhold your taxes on behalf of the state.

This seems broadly accurate, in the sense that middle class wage earners cheat on taxes the least, and have the least ability to. Lower income workers don't cheat out of much taxes either, because they don't have much money and don't get taxed much, but it's widespread for the under the table or cash economy of course. Which yes, leaves consequential tax evasion as mostly the province of the more well off, where it is rampant.

I would think, at least for under the table cash transactions, that it would be more lower income, not higher. That includes the fly by night electrician who will install a new outlet for you as long as you don’t need it certified, cash only, the guy also lives out of his truck. Or is consequential excluding those cases?

Yes it's widespread and frequent among the lower income classes for the reasons you mention. But it's a whole lot less money than tax evasion by the wealthy, for obvious reasons.

I’m not sure, probably. But they are usually skipping out on not only income tax, but self employment taxes. I have to say I don’t find myself bothered by it as much as tax evasion.

I would hazard a guess that the amount of taxes avoided by the top 10% of wealthy in the United States is larger than the actual total income of the bottom 10%.

Avoidance isn’t illegal, however, so I’m not sure why it would count. I’m pretty sure evasion in the top 10% is pretty low, just because they have better accountants and wouldn’t take the risk.

I’m not sure. I do know that until some of Biden’s changes, identifying tax evasion in the lower classes was hardly possible. The only evasion cases worth identifying were those that could pay enough to help fund the expensive prosecution of such crimes. Now, with greater government power over bank accounts (the 600 dollar rule), we should have better ability to measure tax evasion in the lower classes even though we won’t prosecute it yet.

> In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified

This a rather false conclusion. I will concede wealth alone isn’t a predictor of weather someone is likely to commit crime. But, being able to generate wealth on your own is. The example of winning the lottery doesn’t prove much, since that person got lucky, they didn’t generate that wealth on their own. If you can’t generate your own wealth legitimately, then you will be tempted to do illegally, winning the lottery doesn’t change that, you got lucky once, but you still don’t have the skills to generate your own wealth legitimately.

Yes, I would think of it as higher incomes increases a persons opportunity set. If your circumstances/skills/knowledge/intelligence are such that you are limited to minimum wage in your adult hood, then pickpocketing, sticking up a bodega, or breaking into peoples cars may appear to pay out better than if you are making 6 figures straight of college at a FAANG.

And risk-reward evaluation is going to differ based on where you currently are in life. If you make a FAANG income, the idea of being charged with a crime / going to jail is very unappealing and hypothetically career ending. If you are making minimum wage in a dead end job, then having a criminal record isn't going to reset you downwards post-crime.

I would also say there is probably some inverted causation on all the above. Someone who considers carjacking or gets into bar fights is also less likely to be someone to be able to seek education and hold down a steady high paying job. The people you know from high school who ended up with criminal records by their 20s are probably not surprises, and you might have been able to guess who would have those records before the end of elementary school.

Re: whether randomly giving people decreases their proclivity to commit crime.. I would point out the COVID era we had some historically high levels of stimulus, unemployment payments, loan/rent/mortgage/etc forbearance, etc.. and yet crime levels shot up nationally.

This may point to other factors as well.. like young males having time on their hands being more likely to do stupid things.

The "getting lucky once" hypothesis would suggest it's a poor idea to let oligarchs run a country, under the assumption that most oligarchs, like Rockefeller, made their pile by making poor bets that thereupon paid out big.

See: Russia

Most people rely on their employer to generate and capture wealth. Many senior developers would not make it going alone as technical acumen (without salesmanship) is generally insufficient.

This is a pretty terrible article. “Here’s two underspecified theories about crime vs income and I’ll pretend they represent every possible explanation. Now, this questionably designed study shows that an artificial, one-time, unearned, small-scale income shock doesn’t reduce crime. Thus there must be something third variable that correlates to both, like IQ.”

There are so many other variables here, easy to think of if you spend five minutes imagining other people’s lives. Jumping to “there must be something similarly inherently wrong with both criminals and poor people” is a really disturbing leap to want to make.

Anyone have a link to the actual paper? 20k EUR is not exactly life or even circumstance changing, and 20k SEK would only be about 2k EUR. (In addition one expects lottery payouts to skew strongly)

It depends on whether you measure it by frequency or quantity.

We lock people up for stealing a few pounds worth of food but people who make millions from corrupt business dealings, like Baroness Mone, will probably get a slap on the wrist.

Along with a lot of the other excellent skeptical commentary here, I'd add that intergenerational time-frames are probably necessary, or at the very least, a great deal of time. Just because you won the lottery doesn't mean you aren't still addicted to crack, or don't have to deal with that idiot relative of yours who is. Just because you won the lottery doesn't mean that your brain has re-trained itself to respond to minor provocations as if they were not existential threats.

Caveat: I haven't read the paper.

But still.

This is essentially part of what the authors are saying.

Just having more money doesn't fix the environment you grew up in, your lack of education, your exposure to criminals etc.

No, I think the parent is saying that having money might not fix you but it might fix your kids.

yes, this.

in any case, so much just depends on the specific kinds of crimes we are talking about.

Or the genes you have.

My guess is that criminals are evenly sprinkled across income distributions, but being prosecuted skews towards poverty because police / justice incentives are set by wealthy elites.

This does make a certain sense, but be careful of:

* Police incentives are set by wealthy elites might be "Higher policed areas are wealthier" or just "Weathier areas are full of people who commit less petty crime / visible violent crime that would be deterred by patrols"

* "Criminals are evenly sprinkled across income distributions" might actually be that Conscientiousness is highly correlated with lifetime earnings AND Conscientiousness is negatively correlated with lifetime convictions

There's tons of conflicting arrows, nothing is settled, but there sure are lots of political reasons to assume it's a clear case.

> "Higher policed areas are wealthier"

And yet, in places like NYC, the complaint from many activists is the opposite - that poor people get arrested more because its the poorer areas with more policing.

A simple example in NYC is turnstile jumping. The people willing to risk a ticket/police engagement over a $2.90 fare are likely not high income. Yes you do see it even in higher income areas but not at nearly the same rate. Ride a train that goes through rich and poor neighborhoods and spend 10 minutes at the turnstiles of each.. the disparity is huge.

Some argue it's unfair that people have to pay the fare and it should just be free. To me it seems like moving the goalposts on what we consider crime. There's already programs for reduced fairs for students, elderly, and low income. There's plenty of other examples of this behavior.

>” And yet, in places like NYC, the complaint from many activists is the opposite - that poor people get arrested more because it’s the poorer areas with more policing.”

Couldn’t both things be true? Could different cities and police departments have differing contexts, differing problems?

I think we're circling around the well known correlation between conscientousness and lifetime earnings. A conscientious person is more likely to follow rules and procedures by definition and also more likely to earn money as shown by research.

> Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection).

Well wait. Why do allow room for the concept of “incentives” when it comes to police but not when it comes to criminals? Incentive for crime is surely not “evenly sprinkled” across income levels?

Yeah you're right, far more money to be made in white collar crime.

But white collar workers are less likely to be living in life or death levels of poverty. Dire circumstances and lack of alternatives incentivize criminal behavior, while accumulated wealth and social factors strongly disincentivize white collar crime. You’re correct, the payout for white collar crime is potentially unlimited but most white collar crime isn’t Sam bankman Fried it’s low level (often teenage) crypto trading.

Do poor people actually commit more crime, or do they just get caught and prosecuted more? (The usual example is wage theft vs shoplifting).

(Also note that the comments in that post are pretty repulsive)

> In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.

Too strong a conclusion. Crime is complex and there are no easy black & white answers that definitively establish “the” cause. It is much more likely that there are many factors that interact in ways that are difficult to disentangle.

At best, this study is suggestive that simply giving people money is not the whole answer (some may say, “duh”).

It's not just not the whole answer, giving people money didn't help at all. Which suggests that poverty doesn't cause crime, even though it's correlated with crime.

Along with all of the other issues already mentioned, like systematic biases and such, there is another simple possibility that is definitely a factor: impulse control.

If you have good control over impulses, you like are less likely to give in to the impulses to spend money unnecessarily, and this more likely to be financially responsible and thus less likely to be poor. I'm certain plenty of spontaneous petty crime comes down to poor impulse control in the moment.

A few random thoughts… Curious what they consider to be a “crime”, such that a person comes into money, does something ‘criminal’, and is subsequently labeled a recidivist.

If you lived your entire life with financial struggle versus having fallen on hard times, I think the former would have the imagination of the hustle, which would not be entirely subverted by ‘winning the lottery’.

How does one rehabilitate their moral judgment? Education? Not by only winning the lottery.

I’m reminded of Malcolm Gladwell’s reporting of the Starvation Experiment in his podcast Revisionist History. He discusses how the participants were effected their entire life by the experience of near-starvation.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-rise...

People who make bad choices tend to commit the kinds of crime that tend to get caught. People who make bad choices also tend to have more expenditures than income, so they don’t have a lot of money.

Changing the amount of money they have (e.g. winning the lottery as mentioned in the article) doesn’t change a person’s propensity for making bad decisions, so it’s not surprising that they continue to commit crimes, including the kinds of crime that tend to get caught.

Note - there are many ways to become poor that have nothing to do with committing crimes, so just because a person is poor doesn’t mean they are someone who would commit a crime.

Because successful criminals are both more likely to become rich and to not get caught.

There’s also the likelihood that both poverty and (street) criminality are caused by a propensity for poor decision making, high time preference, or most likely some kind of cluster of personality and behavioral patterns.

Anyhow we have absolutely tons of solid data on this now due to Raj Chetty’s superlative work. Naturally he presents his findings in a way that keeps the midwits at Wapo and NYT from accurately presenting them. That this coincidentally keeps him from getting cancelled is no surprise.

Didn’t read the study but I don’t think 50% of Swedes having a whatever the name was savings account is “representative” but I’m not a Swede. I would think that 50% is not randomly distributed. Like could that 50% be older and lower income, more likely to be recent migrants, etc… at least in America people who play the lottery are below average.

I could read the paper, but I’m dubious it or any other study can answer this question to any degree of confidence, with much generalizability.

Wouldn’t this study fall into Simpson’s Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox)?

Do they commit more crime? Or is there a bias in enforcement and measurement toward the types of crime they commit?

This. An example. My homelessness, caused by my disability making me poor, is illegal in many places.

The second one feels like a major part of the puzzle here. Poorer criminals tend towards more 'blatant' crimes, the kind that usually bring the police down on them hard (burglary/robbery, assault/murder, dealing drugs and controlled substances, etc). A wealthier criminal seems like someone more likely to be doing things that are harder to convict for, like fraud or tax evasion or something.

It takes more work to arrest and convict a Bernie Madoff/Sam Bankman Fried style than a street mugger, and the latter type of criminal is probably more likely to be from a low income background.

Why was this [flagged]?

I stopped reading at "It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime."

I suspect the article is neoconservative garbage.

I wish HN would ban these articles making sweeping generalizations and stereotypes about populations.

The guy who wrote this article is a right wing libertarian, who has never had to experience a day of poverty in his life.

This article is an obvious hit job against Universal basic income.

So, you are saying that the richest people have never done anything atrocious? Give me a break. I bet this whole research is sponsored by some billionaire

The guy wrote the article is a right wing libertarian, who went to George Mason University. You don’t succeeded in those universities being against the elite.

Tell me you didn’t read the article without telling me you didn’t read the article.

I’m sure billionaires commit 1000 crimes a day (or do the unethical things that don’t qualify as crimes due to loopholes), they are just not prosecuted. What we often see is the criminalization of poverty.

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