Poverty And Robbery Essay

Literature Review Robbery rates have always fluctuated depending on many outside factors. Currently, we are experiencing a trend of decreasing robbery rates. The academics are intrigued and eager to see why this phenomenon is happening. This paper will examine and summarize the current state of academic literature on the relationship between poverty and robbery. People commit robbery for endless reasons. However, many argue that poverty is a factor that plays a huge role of influencing someone to commit a crime. Poverty is defined as a feeling of hopelessness because one does not have the financial means to support oneself and the loved ones to the standard that society has deemed fit and appropriate. Robbery is an act of taking goods or

However, Hipp and Yates (2011) wanted to see if poverty increase will have accelerated effect on crime. They used census data from 25 cities from 2000 to 2010. After completing the study, they found that if poverty increases robbery will increase but to a certain point. Once the threshold poverty level is reached the robbery rates will start to go down. They theorized that phenomenon by concluding that as neighborhood poverty increases it will get disorganized and crimes will take place, but once the neighborhood is too poor the criminals will see the lack of suitable targets and the robbery rates will decrease from there

In Baltimore, there was an extremely high amount of crimes committed by juveniles. In order to do something about this, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development commissioned a study. Duncan, Hirschfield and Ludwig (2000) were responsible for the study. They took 336 teens age 11 to 16 and their families and helped them move from high to low poverty neighborhoods. They followed up regularly for the duration of the program which lasted for three and a half years. They found out that once removed from the poverty-stricken neighborhoods, the overall crime committed by those juveniles decreased. The results suggested that property offenses among the study participants were higher in the poorer neighborhood due to the better target suitability in that neighborhood. The study also found that the robbery reduction was most prominent change among the individuals of the study. That is phenomenal since the social cost of the robbery is much higher than the perceived risk of additional property