All that are guilty of destroying a communally established consensus of what’s right or wrong will inevitably be punished by being banished or cut off (in one way or another) from the community in question in order for the society to work and maintain itself. Without punishment for doing deliberate harm we move into anarchy. If the time span between of the ill deed and punishment is too wide we slip into irresponsibility and unaccountability and a slower, but no lesser, fall.

It has become “common knowledge” or an urban legend in the West that poverty causes crime rates to skyrocket. It’s in a sense a spin of the idea to beware of those who have nothing to loose. But poverty is not just having nothing. There are two distinct branches of (material) poverty – One is absolute actual poverty when you literally don’t have the basic necessities for life and the second one is the relative poverty – which is based in envy – having “less than”. Relative poverty is when your neighbor has a much better house or much higher income. All of your physical transportation needs are equally well met with an old dinged up Volvo, but a shiny new Benz will make you feel poor. She might have much better shoes or go on exotic vacations. What causes crime is not therefore poverty but the gap of distribution and the rage that comes as a byproduct of envy. In the poor cities or countries where all are equally poor there is virtually no violent crime among the group, It is the same in the rich areas where all have similarly thick bank accounts. But once there are large differences in income distribution in one area, you’re headed for disaster.

This gap is measured by the Gini coefficient, devised by an Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The larger the stratification and the gap between the poorest and the richest the more crime there is. The correlation is so high that it accounts for 90% of the motivation for violent crimes, much less than the 20% higher likelihood that could be derived from personality testing. So if the game is rigged in such a way that a gap is just too big to bridge and you can’t rise in the world by your own wits and effort there is no other choice to get out of the corner you’re pushed in by such stratified culture than to break out violently, punishing those who have more. This goes much deeper than the scarce explanation here. In societies where men are allowed to be polygamists male violence spikes up – because the ones that end up benefiting from this law are those who can financially support it so all the eligible women end up piled up at one end of a curve, causing impotent rage at the other end. So no, poverty does not explain crime and violence, inequality of distribution of resources and chances to advance does. If you’re put in a structure that doesn’t even allow you the chance to rise up if you wish to (due to your caste, prejudice or lack of channels to go through), there’s no reason to not destroy it and its emissaries, and yourself along the way. So the way of addressing this issue is not to punish more severely but to level the playing field so that all have a chance to try and rise.