14 ms·

I'm stupid, but why does unemployment cause violent crime?

• soledades 6y ago
  Unemployment -> desperation -> crime
  • natchy 6y ago
    True, also add extra time on your hands. Poverty + boredom.
  • chad_strategic 6y ago
    Unemployment -> desperation = Revolution or Riots or Crime or Terrorism
• colinmhayes 6y ago
  Choices are about incentives. If you feel you've got nothing to lose you're willing to risk it all.
• zwkrt 6y ago
  You’re not stupid you’ve just never had to deal with a real actual problem in your life. Unemployment is a cause of or certainly concomitant with having very high stress and a very poor outlook on the future. In a town like Bessemer the thought process is something like “I don’t have a job, I’m not going to get one, I have no money, and this situation is not going to change.” And it’s not just you thinking this, you see your friends and family having the same problems. You reach out for help but after a while the good graces of others run out. So do unemployment checks. After a few months you get evicted, so no one else will rent to you, and you are either homeless or at least not in control of your living situation. A slum lord may be involved. The food bank (which was already not a great source of food) is now useless since you need a kitchen to make most of the raw supplies they hand out. The stress and pressure to take care of ones self and ones family under these conditions often leads so serious mental health issues, drug use, and domestic violence. For some it leads to other crimes like stealing, mostly stealing food or stealing things to buy food and drugs. You see your friends falling victim to these issues, getting arrested, dying of exposure, or losing themselves to mental illness. Prospects don’t look good.
  • cheeze 6y ago
    > you’ve just never had to deal with a real actual problem in your life I don't follow how you made that assumption about OP of the comment
    • relaxing 6y ago
      You wouldn’t ask that question if you had.
      • gambiting 6y ago
        But that's still rudely assuming that there is only one kind of " real actual problem in your life", meaning = problem with money and/or unemployment. Is having to make a decision to take your child off life support a "real actual problem in your life"? How about being told that your visa won't be renewed and you have to leave your entire life, job, friends and family behind and move somewhere else? Is that a "real actual problem in your life"? How about a cancer diagnosis? A cheating spouse? Not all "real actual problems" in life have to be related to money - you can have plenty of it and still be in an extremely difficult and distressing situation in your life, which won't naturally lead to increase in violence(cancer diagnosis is probably one of the worst events you can have in your life and yet I cannot imagine it's corellated to increase in violence rates at all). I frankly also find the attitude of the previous poster to be condescening and jugemental.
        • relaxing 6y ago
          No, the parameters of the discussion was “real actual problem” meaning = “problems that put someone in a position where committing violent crime is preferable to the alternative.” It’s reasonable to assume OP’s intent was not to imply all other problems aren’t real. And frankly, you don’t have to have experienced anything remotely similar to understand how economic desperation leads to crime, it just requires a capacity for, and willingness to employ empathy. On the other hand, “Cancer patient goes on crime spree to pay for chemo” sounds like it could be a very funny film, in the hands of the right writer.
    • 6y ago
• tombert 6y ago
  I think being really broke greatly hinders your ability to think rationally. I never committed any violent crimes, but I know throughout most of 2016 I was really really broke (about $15,000 credit card debt, 3 months of unpaid rent, a lawsuit from my landlord for the back rent). In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. My desperate brain was overriding my logical brain. I can only assume I'm not unique in this fact; if it comes down to mugging someone or not eating for a week, I'm not 100% sure which option I would choose. I would like to think that I would never hurt someone, but since 2017 or so, I've had a pretty privileged life.
  • wutbrodo 6y ago
    > In the process I debated reaching out to one of those payday loan places, despite the fact that I knew they were scams. Because they're not, the idea that they are is paternalistic bullshit from the kind of people who get their news from John Oliver. Debt can be dangerous, and payday loans are commensurately more so due to their high rates. But debt is a _tool_, and just like middle- and upper-income folks can use it to prevent disaster or rationally extend themselves, lower-income people can too. Not having access to credit isn't a _good_ thing per se. Whenever people have actually bothered to look into the use of payday loans instead of pearl-clutching about how the poor don't know what's good for them, they've found that much of the clientele is making rational decisions. As bad as a high-interest loan sounds to privileged sensibilities, the alternative is often worse. It's just more diffuse and thus easier to ignore.
    • Judgmentality 6y ago
      Your arguments are entirely theoretical while ignoring the fact that payday loan businesses are regularly shut down for fraud. Just because debt as a concept isn't flawed doesn't mean the people selling debt are moral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Tucker_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Tucker_(businessman) Likewise, just because I post one extreme example of payday loan businesses being a fraud doesn't invalidate the entire industry. As a whole though, I feel the industry is quite scummy and often scammy.
• adrianmonk 6y ago
  Among other things, unemployment is bad for your city's tax base. Law enforcement can probably withstand some budget cuts before public safety suffers, and leaders probably cut other things first, but at some point it might have an effect.
• fooey 6y ago
  Hungry people don't just quietly starve to death, especially if they have other people depending on them.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jandrese 6y ago
  Are you asking why people who have run out of money might turn to stealing? Even if you are trying to be nonviolent a life of crime is hard and eventually you'll find yourself in a situation where you have to use violence because there is nothing else to turn to. You certainly can't go to the cops.
  • macintux 6y ago
    Plus, once you have a felony on your record, your job prospects go to absolute shit, so it’s hard to avoid crime as a way to survive.
• yardie 6y ago
  Unemployment itself doesn't cause crime, but unemployment and a weak social safety net will definitely cause crime. I've lived in Western Europe countries with absurdly high unemployment rates, to this American, >10%, 25% youth, and I never felt unsafe, mostly. You got a stipend, subsidized housing, and job training. But in the US, unemployment, desperation, and easy access to firearms can be a big problem. BTW, I'm still shocked by the casualness of people who threaten to shoot me. Or like to show they are armed in an attempt to intimidate me.
  • squidlogic 6y ago
    As a US native I’ve never had someone threaten to shoot me or show me they were armed to intimidate me. I’m not exactly living a sheltered life either. I have a few questions, sorry if this sounds like a lot I’m just really curious. What city are you in where this happens? What are you doing to provoke this kind of behavior? Why haven’t you moved away to somewhere safer?
    • WalterBright 6y ago
      I have. Seattle. I was mugged by 3 armed teenage hoodlums. It was a long time ago, but I still have a bad reaction when people come up behind me.
    • mattlondon 6y ago
      In my experience it happens a fair bit at the long, long, long immigration lines at US air ports if you are not a US citizen. Guards fondling their gun holster and shouting at people for using a phone or sitting on the floor after queuing for 3 or 4 hours. Welcome to America. I guess you don't experience this if you are a US native. And also obviously it happens frequently in SF from the homeless people. That is probably more worrying as they potentially have "nothing to lose"
      • BrandoElFollito 6y ago
        I have traveled extensively to the US (I am French), probably 10+ times a year. The way people are "welcomed" to the US is horrible - I felt like this only in Russia. Once the border officer asked me (or rather - barked at me) "why are you coming to the US?", to what I said "for business". "For how long?" - to what I answered "for 3 days" He then asks "why so short?" to what I answered "I swear if I could squeeze it to one day I would gladly come and go not to spend money in a country that is so welcoming" (it was a very long, tiring flight and I really wanted to go to the hotel, afer having queued up for 2 hours) He told me that I should not reply like this, to what I said that this is the truth. We had a small staring contest and he let me go. The other similar case in Russia was when the border guard was yelling at me for not having my passport number printed on my ticket (yes, I do not know either), to which I yelled back to kick me out of their country with a "never return" stamp because I am fed up enough to have a week-end ruined with tha travel. I showed him my hands together (as in "handcuff me") and he pushed me into Russia. The stay was great, people were great.
• lsiebert 6y ago
  When people don't have legally acquired money to exchange for things they need like food, they turn to other means to acquire those things. Also when people believe that they can't, by legal and socially acceptable means, thrive, their belief in the current social order is undermined. A lot of society operates on trust in fundamental fairness; for people who find that life is fundamentally unfair, that trust is eroded, sometimes permanently.
• cbozeman 6y ago
  Because our species derives from irrational ape-like ancestors and entirely too many of us don't realize we're now an ant colony. Yes, 10,000 years ago our monkey brains were just fine at navigating the world as it existed. They're not just fine at it today. Today, even some of the simplest jobs require advanced skills in disparate areas, and frankly about 16% of the entire world population is not up to the task. Sixteen percent is the amount of the world population with an IQ at or under 85. These are people who struggle with tasks as simple as folding a sheet of paper into thirds, more or less perfectly, and then placing it into an envelope. The world we live in, and almost certainly the world we're creating, has no place for these people. Even something as simple as receiving merchandise on a dock in a warehouse requires some basic computer skills, from either operating a Windows or Linux machine and interfacing with SAP, Oracle's JD Edwards, or IBM's AS/400, to figuring out the proper layout of boxes on a wooden pallet to maximize storage space of the warehouse. Something your grandfather or great grandfather did with a 6th grade education, now requires a minimum of a high school education by necessity, if not by design. That brings me to actual answer to your question... because they don't have the decency to lay down and die. Because inside every human is an irrational desire to live, even when you're no longer useful. I know, know... a long argument can, and likely will, be made that "every life is valuable", etc., so forth. I understand and even accept those arguments on an emotional level, because I am not a machine - I am a man, and because I find it morally repugnant to allow people to die because they have no economic value. That said... clearly there are plenty of others who do not feel the same way. If you work on AI to streamline a process or aid in manufacturing, you feel this way. The people who employ you, feel this way. You cannot design an algorithm that replaces 7,800 jobs and then throw your hands up and say, "I'm just doing my job." We either have to decide that everyone is worthy of life, regardless of their intellectual abilities and their economic contribution, or we have to decide that's not the case. Right now, because no one is taking Universal Basic Income seriously, we're clearly deciding that your value is mostly - one could argue almost entirely - economically based. We have a few exceptions to this that I can think of off the top of my head - the clergy seem to provide some kind of non-productive "good" that enough people, in America at least, feel is worth the cost of supporting them. But the factory worker who makes widgets for your ConsumerGoodX that you bought, she apparently does not. I would like to be wrong about this, but our actions as a society say otherwise. We reward companies that reduce their "human capital" and return the money that would be spent on those salaries to either expanding their operations or in dividends to their shareholders. We reward them with higher stock prices and increased demand to purchase those stocks. We reward them by purchasing their goods. We tell ourselves another story, because if you really thought long and hard enough about it, you'd likely have to do some serious soul searching. Most of us don't want to do that.
• annoyingnoob 6y ago
  Starve your self for a week. Hunger will make you do things you never thought you would/could do.
• CapitalistCartr 6y ago
  No income > can't pay bills or buy necessities > desperation > mild panic & muddied thinking while looking for any way to make money > overrides the inner restraint against crime.
• yuppie_scum 6y ago
  The easiest way to answer this is to just say go watch The Wire.
• markdown 6y ago
  It doesn't in developed countries, because they have a strong social safety net. But in countries going through late stage capitalism, if you don't have a job, you have to rob your neighbour to eat.
  • refurb 6y ago
    Oh really? So no increase in crime in Europe with increasing unemployment? I doubt it.
    • markdown 6y ago
      Europe is a continent with numerous countries, each on a different spot on the economic spectrum. Any country with a strong social safety net will be far better off when unemployment spikes than one without such a net. When humans care about their fellow man, society flourishes. When it's every man for himself, spiralling unemployment means crime, anarchy, and chaos.
      • refurb 6y ago
        That explains the grenade attacks in Sweden.
        • markdown 6y ago
          How so? Perhaps you need me to be more clear. When there is unemployment, crime goes up. This happens no matter where in the world you are. I didn't think I needed to spell that out. Countries with a strong social safety net will be far safer when unemployment rises out of control. That's just common sense. It's why Sweden is multiple times safe than the US, regardless of the unemployment rate. They have a social safety net.
• kbenson 6y ago
  Being unemployed may make some turn to crime to support themselves. Crime often puts people in stressful situations. People in stressful situations sometimes act violently, even if that's not their default mode of conduct. As a simple example, imagine someone shoplifting some food from a market, where an employee confronts them and bars their way, saying they are calling the police. The shoplifter tries to leave, and a scuffles ensues while the employee tries to restrain the accused. It's very easy for the crime to become assault while someone is fleeing, and nobody needed to intend for any violence at any point.
• zeruch 6y ago
  Desperate conditions breed desperate responses.