As a matter of fact, there are multiple causes of crime, including personal characteristics, lack of discipline, politics, religious disagreements, and racism. However, poverty may be regarded as the most substantial cause of the majority of crimes as it indirectly leads to non-compliance with the law in multiple ways. First of all, poverty frequently leads to the inability to receive proper education and subsequent unemployment.
Moreover, poverty is closely connected with income inequality that may be defined as “one of the sources of aggression and violent crime in human society” (Coccia, 2017, p. 190). In turn, unemployment causes depression, desperation, stress, anxiety, and aggression that lead to alcohol consumption, drug abuse, and criminal activities. In other words, people are frequently forced to commit crime, especially robbery and mugging, as they are not provided with alternatives.
At the same time, poverty contributes to the development of criminal behavior. As previously mentioned, poverty may result in depression, aggression, alcohol consumption, and homicides. In turn, poor adults who have job spend almost all time trying to earn for living. As a result, children in poor families are often neglected or even abused. Subsequently, they may also demonstrate aggression, a lack of sympathy and self-control, poor conscience, and jealousy in relation to well-off community members – these are the antecedent conditions of crime. Subsequently, early indicators of criminal behavior incorporate a lack of discipline at home, the violation of school rights, and less serious crimes, such as larceny or burglary, determined by the simplicity and quickness of getting desired things (Britt, 2019).
Developmental processes refer to the involvement in more serious crimes and criminal communities. In turn, maintenance variables incorporate low education, the absence of legal opportunities for life improvement, unemployment, and growing aggression. In this way, forming criminal behavior, poverty as the main cause of crime contributes to the violation of the law.
References
Britt, C. L. (2019). Age and crime. In D. P. Farrington, L. Kazemian & A. R. Piquero (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of developmental and life-course criminology (pp. 13-33). Oxford University Press.
Coccia, M. (2017). A Theory of general causes of violent crime: Homicides, income inequality and deficiencies of the heat hypothesis and of the model of CLASH. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 37, 190-200. Web.