Crime as a Social Cost of Poverty and Inequality: A Review Focusing on Developing Countries



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Septiembre de

violence. Through this channel, they may inflict serious losses to society.
This relationship maybe direct, as more inequality and poverty make crime
more profitable at a given level of crime deterrence. It may also be indirect,
going through the amount that a society is willing to spend in crime
deterrence. The questions we ask in this section are: (i) whether there is
evidence of such a relationship between crime and inequality or poverty
and (ii) wrhat may be the importance of the negative effect of inequality
on total (urban) income which goes through crime. We also address briefly
the issue of the possible influence on inequality on crime deterrence.

It must be stressed at the outset that it is extremely difficult to answer
the preceding questions. There essentially are two main sets of reasons
for this. First, we have seen that a host of sociological factors could be
responsible for the degree of violence observed in a society but controlling
for them in a statistical analysis of crime is practically impossible. Even
though there is little doubt that economic disadvantages have always been
an important cause of criminality, they are a necessary, but certainly not
a sufficient, condition of high crime rates in a given social group. This is
particularly clear in all studies of the ethnic dimension of crime and
violence. While minority groups in developed countries w here crime rates
arc high are characterized by high indicators of social and economic
disadvantage, the converse is not necessarily true. In England, Indian
migrants are as discriminated against as much as Caribbeans and Africans.
Yet crime and imprisonment rates are much higher in the second group.
The same is true of Moroccans
versus Turks in the Netherlands, or
Southeast Asian ιuersus Latin American immigrants in the US2f,.

The second difficulty is purely statistical. We have previously seen how
difficult it is to get reliable scries and data on crime and violence across
countries or cities, and even across time in a given country or city. It is
still more difficult to put into evidence a relationship between these scries
and data on international or inter-temporal differences in poverty and
inequality. Even though wc are more interested in developing countries,
this is the reason w hy we shall begin by reviewing briefly the ease of the
US. undoubtedly the country' w'here crime data are the least scarce. We

6 These various example SaretakcnfromTonry (1997).

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