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Utopia Talk / Politics / Crime and socioeconomic status
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Wed Mar 01 08:36:00
A giant leap in the instituional understanding of crime. The Swedish crime prevention council issued a report:

TLDR: The association between crime and socioeconomic status is so weak that you can not predict who will commit crime based on their socioeconomic background.

http://bra...nomisk-bakgrund-och-brott.html

Certainly the report is far from perfect, the entire ”other risk factor” section is a list of things with fairly sizable heritability, but I choose to see the glas as half full :-)
Paramount
Member
Wed Mar 01 11:08:26
” The association between crime and socioeconomic status is so weak that you can not predict who will commit crime based on their socioeconomic background.”


What does this mean? That someone who doesn’t have an income is as likely to committ a crime as someone who makes 1 million SEK per year?
Habebe
Member
Wed Mar 01 12:11:43
Someone who makes a million SEK/year almost certainly broke some law.

You can't bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.
Seb
Member
Wed Mar 01 12:57:54
"When compared with factors that research has identified as risk factors for crime, such as parenting competence, the presence of conflicts in the family, school problems or association with criminal peers, the research shows that these have a stronger connection with criminal behavior than socio-economic background factors. The same applies to risk factors linked to the individual himself, for example permissive attitudes or impulsivity."


This seems to suggest they controlled for numerous factors that correlate with socioeconomic group.

Which then isn't so surprising.

Socioeconomic status is a crude proxy for poor parenting, conflicted family life, bad education etc.

If you can isolate those factors independently it is not at all surprising that these matter more than income.
Seb
Member
Wed Mar 01 13:00:32
It also seems to be the standard thing:

Weak factors mean you don't know that someone is a criminal of they are poor as most poor people are not criminals; but if you have a criminal you know they are disproportionately likely to be poor.

This is what I call the Sam Adams fallacy: if poor are overrepresented in crime stats, a poor person is likely to be criminals.
Sam Adams
Member
Wed Mar 01 13:51:32
They are more likely to be criminals, certainly. You leaving out key words is not my problem.

"Socioeconomic status is a crude proxy for poor parenting, conflicted family life, bad education etc."

For fleeting moments you understand. Im sure youll devolve into woke nonsense asap but for those precious few moments you were thinking logically.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Thu Mar 02 09:16:33
Paramount
Not entirely, but the report does say that when using self reported criminal activity, the difference is smaller than thought. I think the issue is like ”homelesness”, a lot of people end up on the street, but for most it is a passing low point of their life, for some it isn’t. Alog of young men i dependent of their parents income, commit crime, a fraction of them keep going down this path. Thise men are most often from poor families.

The report is saying what people have been saying, including me on this forum, the vast majority of poor people do not commit crime, the vasy majority of people living in the ”bad” part of the city do not commit crime. There was a Swedish study a decade ago by Amir Sariaslan, he used twin studies to control for the heritable component of crime and the association between neighbordhood and crime vanished. I posted this study here when it was relevant. They used all kinds of family data, twins, siblings, cousins and there was a clear heritability according to genetic relationship. So obviously a lot of these relatives do not live in the same part of the city, the same city nor in the same socio economic class, but there was a criminal convictions at the expected rate given genetic relationship. So if one twin was convicted there was like an 80-90% chance the other twin was concicted, siblings 50%, cousins, 25%, basically what you expected given the genetic relationship becoming more distant.

Poverty and bad neighbordhoods don’t cause crime.
Sam Adams
Member
Thu Mar 02 10:58:55
So... shoot the families of criminals too.
murder
Member
Thu Mar 02 13:30:08

"The report is saying what people have been saying, including me on this forum, the vast majority of poor people do not commit crime, the vasy majority of people living in the ”bad” part of the city do not commit crime."

This is almost certainly not true unless it's only in reference to violent crime. Trafficking in obviously stolen property is common, and people will procure prescription medication without ever seeing a doctor. There are also tons of small businesses that operate illegally (without permits/license) ... and you know ... the occasional clandestine doctor who may or may not have been a real doctor in another country before migrating and setting up their illegal clinic.

Certain things become normalized in poor neighborhoods and no one (or almost no one) thinks anything of it.
murder
Member
Thu Mar 02 13:34:59

Thinking back to my youth, I'm hard pressed to think of anyone in my neighborhood who never engaged in some type of illegal activity.

Prostitution, soliciting prostitutes, false documents, human trafficking (smuggling), illegally selling fireworks, vandalism/graffiti ...

The list goes on and on.

murder
Member
Thu Mar 02 13:37:43

Driving without licenses or insurance was pretty common. Unreported domestic violence and fights in the streets.

...
Sam Adams
Member
Thu Mar 02 13:42:59
Most of those arent real crimes. No one cares if you buy vicodin or drive a little over the drunk limit or screw a hooker.
Seb
Member
Thu Mar 02 13:58:02
Nim:


"The report is saying what people have been saying, including me on this forum, the vast majority of poor people do not commit crime, the vasy majority of people living in the ”bad” part of the city do not commit crime.
...
Poverty and bad neighbordhoods don’t cause crime."

That doesn't follow though.

If this study isolates poverty from education, you show poverty plus good education means no crime.

But one of the things that effects education is poverty and living in a shit part of town with shit schools. So they tend to be correlated and causally so.

What this does is show the causal chain as to what it is about poverty that can impact crime rates.

Not poverty in itself, but things that tend to go along with poverty.

Seb
Member
Thu Mar 02 13:59:15
And the fact that poverty does not *inevitably* mean bad education, and bad education does not *inevitably* lead to crime, and not ALL crime is committed by people with these factors does not mean to say there isn't a causal relationship either.

Not everyone who smokes gets cancer.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Mar 03 04:38:29
It does follow yes, very clear from Sariaslan’s studies, no correlation.

These studies are extra important because as I have said before, these Nordic systems are in many ways the best we have accomplished throwing money at the problem, together with extensive social insurances, access to education etc and so on, policy that reduced environmental varstions in access to resources vital for thriving.

Poverty does not cause crime (something else does), criminality keeps you in poverty (for the criminal) and misery (for the neighborhood they are operating in). Many good reasons to lift people out of poverty, but reducing crime isn’t one of them. In fact these.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Mar 03 04:43:35
”Not everyone who smokes gets cancer.”

Because of genetics. Which is the argument I am making, the difference between poor people/smokers who go on a life long path of crime and destruction / cancer diagnosis, is genetics.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Mar 03 05:17:01
And those that don’t*

This is intuitively evident from the statistical observation that a small fraction of poor people are convicted of crime. And poor here is proxy for low IQ, low income, bad neighborhood. Only a fraction of these groups commit crime and whatever weak correlation there is, vanishes once you control for familial criminal convictions. We do well in treating criminality, poverty and low scholastic achievement as fundamentally caused by different things, as opposed to crime being caused by poor education and poverty, even if there is overlap.
Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Mar 03 05:31:43
http://aca...e/42/4/1057/656274?login=false

^Here is one of the studies where they followed the same families with siblings born and raised in different neighborhoods.

Did the neighborhood cause crime? Not when you controlled for crime in the family.

http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/childhood-family-income-adolescent-violent-criminality-and-substance-misuse-quasiexperimental-total-population-study/A5CF371A1776F376ED11FCB5A22305A5#

https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/50/5/1628/6288123

Family income, Sweden and Finland.

http://www.nature.com/articles/tp201662

^Also Sariaslan, living in ”deprived” neighborhood is 65% heritable.



Nimatzo
iChihuaha
Fri Mar 03 07:41:59
”mean bad education, and bad education does not”

Most people that get a ”bad” education don’t commit crime, no correlation once you factor family. I mean you are just making another version of the same argument. Poor people live in poor neighborhoods and their children go to ”poor” school. We are talking about the same people and observing them as cohorts.

Besides in Sweden this is completely irrelevant since all primary education parents have a free choice of which school their kids can go to. As I have said, repeatedly, the Nordic systems, are as far as social constructivist social theory in practice, the best we have done. A lot has been done here to eliminate socio/economic differences in access to equal education specifically, but the entire social safety net is designed around the individual.
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