Being poor doesn’t make someone a murderer.
For decades, criminologists have pushed the debunked theory that poverty causes crime. The contents of a recent Brookings Institution report suggest that old habits die hard.
The report’s authors sought to answer a question: Why did homicides increase in 2020 and 2021 and fall in 2023 and 2024? The pandemic-era murder spike, they argued, “was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas.” While parts of this claim were coherent—unemployment and school closures left young males idle and free to act violently—why would the homicide increases have been tied to low-income areas? The authors argue that it was because people who grow up in poor neighborhoods “have fewer opportunities, weaker professional networks, and earn less income than those in other areas.”
