Criminal by Tom Gash

Author:Tom Gash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

THE ODD EFFECTS OF MONEY

The realization that living in less deprived communities doesn’t necessarily improve children’s behaviour raises doubts about the efficacy of policies aimed at creating mixed communities in order to reduce crime. There may be other good reasons for social mixing, but subsidizing public housing benefits does not appear to reduce crime and is extremely costly. But what about other policy interventions that seek to reduce crime by targeting poverty more directly? Can we reduce crime by improving employment prospects or by increasing, rescheduling or reallocating state benefits?

In a criminologist’s ideal world, there would be programmes that assigned wealth and poverty or jobs and unemployment at random. Unsurprisingly, such experiments have never quite passed muster with politicians, worried about voters’ reactions to arbitrary handouts. Lotteries perhaps provide the closest we can get to a type of natural investigation into wealth and crime, but they are few and rarely researched.

These isolated cases do show us, however, that new-found wealth is not always a protective barrier against criminality. Edward Putman was a convicted rapist and many were outraged when he won nearly £5m on the UK national lottery. Surprisingly, he was subsequently jailed not for violence but for fraudulently claiming housing benefit and income support, applying for the undeserved benefits after he had won his millions.40 A Virginia lottery winner, Kay Revell, meanwhile was recently arrested for two counts of drug dealing, despite clearly not needing the money.41 Some have arguably been pushed closer to crime by lottery winnings. Charles Riddle won $1m in the Michigan Lottery in 1975. His life spiralled out of control before he was sentenced to three years in prison for drug dealing ten years later.42 Desmond Noonan, part of a family notorious for their involvement in protection rackets, violence and drug distribution, used part of his family’s lottery winnings not to go straight but to invest in a wholesale heroin purchase he was later convicted of trafficking.43

So there are no simple, automatic connections between poverty and crime. Rather, the relationship between crime and earnings is highly complex and works both ways, with crime often contributing to poverty.44 Being caught committing crime is, after all, a pretty effective way of losing your job and ruining future employment and income prospects. In most countries, those found guilty of even minor offences need to declare their criminal records to potential employers for five to ten years after their convictions – a fact that creates barriers to employment for thousands of teenagers at the very point in their lives when they most need to build up work experience and skills in order to become attractive to future employers.

Wealth can create criminal opportunities. At the time when people are most flush with cash – pay day – crime peaks across most countries. Violent crime, in particular, spikes wildly, often nearly doubling as wage earners spend their cash on alcohol, drugs and whatever else helps them to celebrate and in turn they encounter various types of social conflict (see Myth 11). And just as pay days affect social routines, so too do wider changes in employment patterns.

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