I completely agree that the idea that giving people housing and food would magically stop crime is utterly absurd. However, reducing the number of children gro

I completely agree that the idea that giving people housing and food would magically stop crime is utterly absurd. However, reducing the number of children growing up in highly stressful poverty situations may well lead to a reduction in crime over years and decades. It's absurd on the scale of bribing individual criminals, but it's not absurd on a societal scale to reduce the conditions where crime is likely to grow. Also, obviously, not all crime is the same. Plenty of crime could never be prevented by any kind of policy. But there also is a lot of minor crime that probably could.