Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Poverty is the mother of crime.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.
In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.
What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.
Poverty itself is not so bad as the poverty thought. It is the conviction that we are poor and must remain so that is fatal.
Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.
If we were really tough on crime, we'd try to save our children from the desperation and deprivation that leave them primed for a life of crime.
Poverty is not the root cause of crime.
It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.