I should have been more specific: > Most property crime transfers wealth to poorer people, making them less poor and reducing poverty. This is the part that I

I should have been more specific: > Most property crime transfers wealth to poorer people, making them less poor and reducing poverty. This is the part that I think is unequivocally false. If you live in poverty and you steal property, you do not then become "less poor" unless you subsequently use the property you stole to better yourself in other ways unrelated to the crime. It is not the transfer of wealth that made you less poor, it is your use of the wealth that you took, be it material or financial. As an example, street gangs often "own" enough asset value in weapons, drugs, cash, and real estate to live in a better, less violent, and less poor life, but they and their families still suffer all of the symptoms of "poverty", because they do not use the assets they take to reduce their own "poverty" but rather to perpetuate the methods by which they acquired their property. There are some edge cases, but for the most part, property crime does not reduce "poverty" any more than caffeine pills reduce "chronic sleepiness". I do not disagree that convicting and imprisonment increase poverty; I am openly in favor of prison reform and am aware that any criminal charges can seriousy impact lifetime earning potential. > So far, this discussion has been about theft, robbery, and poverty. White-collar crime is very different. No, it is not. Rich criminals have the same instincts to win, dominate, hurt, steal, lie, and otherwise oppress other people that poor criminals do. "White-collar" crime is blue-collar crime committed by more intelligent, well-connected people. Blue-collar crime in the case of theft and robbery uses the threat of personal violence to extract wealth from a person or a person's business; the white-collar crime in the way I mentioned it uses the threat of state violence to extract cash from an institution. Both are lawless--one is below the law, the other above the law. Your and other people's inability to understand this principle is the source of a massive road block in societal reform. > This is a straw man argument. Go back and read what I actually wrote. This I concede; you did not say this. However, your belief that white-collar crime and blue-collar crime are fundamentally different and your statement that "property crime...makes them less poor and reduces poverty" make me suspicious that you actually do think that a simple transfer of wealth from rich to poor is enough to reduce both poverty and crime to a degree where it does not bother the rest of society.