Coleman Hughes conversation with Rafael Mangual concerning the link between crime and poverty. Coleman Hughes on America’s Failed Criminal Justice Experiment with Rafael Mangual  

Mangual says he doesn’t see it. While a link between poverty or inequality and crime seems intuitive, he says it’s not when you get below the surface.  

1) the vast majority of poor people are law-abiding.

2) yes, a lot of criminals are poor, but we don’t know which way the causation runs. Perhaps the sorts of anti-social characteristics that leads one down a life of crime also lead to a lack of economic success. This would in fact, seem to be clear from trying to find a correlation between economic indicators and violence.  

For example, in NYC, between 1990 and 2015, poverty more or less stays the same, and even goes up a bit, but crime shows a massive (90%) decline. This would indicate that whatever association poverty has to crime, it is nowhere close to being an immediate cause of violence.  

Most crime comes from beefs someone has against another. Maybe not legitimate beefs, but one takes offense and feels like he needs to settle it through violence.

I think this comes from insecurity. People can feel insecure and therefore any perceived slight  seems like disrespect, which they can’t handle.

I grew up with two loving parents and they instilled a sense of innate self-worth in me. Even when I had nearly nothing, and I would meet people with more, I wasn’t insecure. The fact that other people had more than me didn’t make me feel like I was ‘less than’. Because I had that innate sense of self-worth, I wasn’t worried about people’s disrespect. Even if I was directly disrespected, I felt no particular need to rectify the other person’s understanding. I figured they obviously had a problem and that was them, not me. Clearly, it is better to have innate self-worth than insecurity, particularly of the violent type.

I can see one pushback being that of course, naturally, those with less will tend to suffer from some natural sense of inferiority, due strictly to the fact that they not only have less, but they even struggle to have enough to live. I accept that such circumstances would tend to push people that way. But I myself had very little as a young married man. We had to make our way as best we could while I worked at a warehouse, and then as a helper on a construction crew. My wife worked at a mall. I think we made 16k combined our first year of marriage, and spend much of our early years kind of scraping by. Even so, when I would meet rich people, as I did while I worked in construction, I never felt that I was ‘less than’ them even if they made more money. They made more, I made less. That happens in the world. It might be because they worked harder, it might be because they started from a better position… the reason didn’t really matter. I was in my place in life, and they were in theirs. I felt no inferiority because of that because I’ve learned to accept where I am in life. So poverty, per se, can’t be THE thing that drives people to this sense of inferiority that leads them to demand or crave respect. If it was, I would have felt inferior too, and I didn’t.  

My guess is that it was due to my being raised by loving parents, who instilled a sense of self-worth in me because they loved me and accepted me.  

And I’ve seen through my years, many of which were spent living in lower middle class neighborhoods, this attitude of people that are extremely touchy about respect. The thing is, they don’t tend to give much respect. The way to GET respect is to elevate oneself. Of course if you don’t feel you have any real way to elevate yourself, you can at least effect an elevation relative to others by knocking those around you down. In other words, they spread disrespect around in an attempt to be respected. But who likes being disrespected? So it tends to rebound to them, further cementing the sense of inferiority they already have. Being strong enough to instill fear on those that would disrespect you back is one way to avoid them disrespecting you back. They may not respect you, but they won’t ever tell you to your face.  

I get that these things are complex. But I see so much misdiagnosis of the problems. And if the problem is misdiagnosed, then the proposed solutions aren’t going to change anything. They in fact, may make things worse for the very people they’re supposed to be helping.  

This is the gist of the Mangual’s book- pushing for decarceration and depolicing does its greatest damage to those communities it says it intends to help.