Poverty and crime are inextricably linked

Feb 13, 2014 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
There is incontrovertible evidence that poverty and crime are linked, hence, my disagreement with the subject of your editorial of the 28th January 2014, which stated among others that there is no link between crime and poverty.
“Poverty and crime have a very “intimate” relationship that has been described by experts from all fields, from sociologists to economists. The UN and the World Bank both rank crime high on the list of obstacles to a country’s development. This means that governments trying to deal with poverty often also have to face the issue of crime as they try to develop their country’s economy and society, hence the inextricable link between poverty and crime”.
While politicians like to say that poverty is not linked to crime, international organizations often make the point that crime which includes public sector corruption, often exposes vulnerable sectors of the population to the risk of poverty, which is very often accompanied by crime.  According to one international report “the unmistakable connection between poverty and crime is that they’re both geographically concentrated – in a strikingly consistent way. In other words, where you find poverty is very often where you find crimes of various types.
Some time back a minister of the PPP administration was quoted as saying that poverty does not cause crime. He went on to say that if poverty was linked to crime, Amerindians were supposed to be heavily involved in crime, since they are about the poorest people in the country.
I pointed out then, that this was an erroneous assumption, since it did not take into account the fact that the Amerindians are about the only people in Guyana who still live in traditional settings, which would have insulated them somewhat from many of the elements which habitually affect their counterparts who live in urban environments where the majority of crime is concentrated. This being the case as the Amerindian subsistence traditional lifestyle does not engender materialism or greed.
By extension, one could postulate that if poverty and crime were linked then rural people would be represented more in crime. While many rural communities still possess much of their traditional values, urban transformational forces among others, have delivered urban-type problems at their very doorsteps, to the extent that police community relations in much of rural Guyana is characterized by acrimony, mutual suspicion and sometimes open hostility and violence.
Many rural communities just cannot survive on their current income base – this in turn leads to hopelessness, helplessness, despair, poor nutrition, prolonged stress and fatigue, alcohol and drug abuse even among rural women, which cause numerous degenerative diseases, breakdown in family and community structures, suicide, prostitution, marijuana cultivation, praedial larceny, piracy, smuggling and a litany of illegal activities which the remote nature of rural communities afford. These are but some of the diverse coping mechanisms rural people employ to deal with the effects of poverty and rural underdevelopment.
While the causes of crime, especially urban crime are infinite, urban poverty and urban unemployment are two of the most important factors; which brings vocational training into the equation. Thousands of youths traverse the streets of our urban areas daily without any salable skills or any hope of securing meaningful employment at home or abroad.
In fairness to politicians and the Kaieteur News editorial, which failed to make a distinction between quality of life crimes and/or those crimes which have their genesis in material insufficiency; it must be acknowledged that many crimes are caused by a breakdown in structures at the family and community level, which has no relationship with poverty. I have always held the view that many homes and communities, especially afro-Guyanese communities, have sufficient resources to do better.
Many young African men who turn to crime are disoriented to the point of steadfastly holding onto unrealistic assumptions; one such view is that even though he possesses few salable skills, he has no desire to learn and believes that he could not or should not work for this or that because there is no incentive to work. Very often he is not a lazy person, but rather those views – a form of messed up thinking – have their origin in a specific subculture.
For example, in many African countries where there is a dominant African population, and a minority white, Indian and Lebanese population. The expatriates would rent space from Africans and establish businesses and nurture them overtime, wherein those businesses become strong, to the point where the expatriates dominate the local business sector. This trend was started more than a hundred years ago and prevails even now.
In response, the Africans would blame the whites, government or local Indian business class for their every woe; it would seem that blaming others exclusively has become an “evolutionary stable strategy” among black folks. Just look at the manner in which many in our communities squander resources at a domestic level. Under closer consideration, the situation gets worse at the community level, and NGOs, including churches, which used to be among the best managed entities in the community, have now become part and parcel of the mismanaged malaise. So that while mismanagement in itself is sometimes a crime, mismanagement at the domestic, community and higher levels can also lead to crime.
It is important, however, that we make a distinction between crimes which allegedly have their origin in” material immiseration” and those which could be described in the words of Professor Sung Habo  of the Public University of China – as having to do with an entrenched privilege mentality, such as those crimes committed by the joint services, governmental officials and their children; children of the middle class, and as of late, many individuals in newly-emerged middle income countries who, in the words of former South African President Nelson Mandela, are devoid of focus of aspiration, because they do not know what it is to make sacrifices for anything, since the generations before them have already paid the price and paved the way.
Clairmont Featherstone

 

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