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Comment by vicnov | Hacker News Reader

You can be poor and obey the law. You can protect the poor and enforce the law.

It is the weird identity politics is what gets in the way.

There's a easier solution by crime caused by poor people: they stop being poor. The fact that nobody tried is the thing that should be studied instead.

There's abundant evidence against this belief:

  * Lottery winners do not commit less crime than those who do not win the lottery: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31962
  * Studies of identical twins adopted and raised apart shows that crime is more correlated with genetics than environment: 45% nature vs 18-27% nurture https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
  * "While individual study estimates vary, meta-analyses have suggested the level of heritability of antisocial behavior is approximately 40–60%. Shared environmental factors have been estimated to explain approximately 11–14% of the variance in antisocial/criminal behavior and non-shared environmental influences approximately 31–37%" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6640871/
  * “Black men raised in the top 1 percent – by millionaires – were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-debate/

Indenting that triggered monospace code formatting, which is preventing those from becoming links.

I'm hearing this high pitched sound, does anyone else hear that?

I clicked and scrolled through several of those studies, and those snippets are incredibly misleading. I would recommend not using these in debates, unless you want to come across as a poor researcher acting in bad faith.

The very last one says nothing about genetics at all, that's saying the justice system is biased.

The second to last is part of a much more nuanced section talking about environmental impacts and the role that can play in biological expression. It literally says:

> Thus, just as biological mechanisms can influence environmental responses, environmental stressors can affect biological expressions.

I stopped reading at that point.

I grew up poor and that was never an inducement to commit crime. I took plenty of "food I didn't want" off my friends' hands at lunch in middle and high school, but never even thought of crime.

Although my parents weren't rich they still tried to teach right from wrong, respect for others and all the rest.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but there's plenty of examples of rich assholes who act as if money makes them immune from justice.

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