but a rise in street crime is not just due to the poor not having enough money for necessities. Most street crime is for luxuries, non-essentials,
usually conducterd by people who can already afford the paraphernalia of crime, such as burglar tools, weapons, and getaway cars. No one could blame a man for stealing bread to steal his family, but shooting someone for a fashionable pair of shoes or some bling is something else again.

Also, the social groups where crime breeds were not always prone to crime, "poor" was not always synonymous with criminal. Neither was "race". This is a social phenomenon and although it is related to economics, the connection is not a direct or clear-cut one.

My opinion about the rise in crime (that is, crime that is real, not just more noticeable because we report it more frequently) is that it is due to a deterioration in human institutions. The rise in crime is the result of the breakdown in community and family. Single parent families, unwed mothers, teen-age pregnancies, unemployment, are not just symptoms of poverty, they cause it too. Kids are brought up without supervision and neighborhoods are haphazard and temporary affairs. For the first time in history, people do not know their neighbors, we are a nation of unsocialized loners. This is why kids join gangs, there is no other sense of band or clan left, and as primates, we need that. The traditional community institutions: school, church, workplace, neighborhood, nuclear and extended family, the neighbors, the village, indeed, the tribe, are of no use. Government, whether it be the welfare check or the armed legionairre, can take up some of the slack but not all. All that matters, not just for necessities, but for prestige, status, recognition, everything, is money. And when there is no money, any way to get it is fair game. We are helpless and desperate without it. Without money we cannot do anything for ourselves. And there are only two places to get money, either steal it or work for someone who may not need to hire you.

Modern industrial society has made these family and community obsolete, and the government's attempts to substitute legislated welfare institutions to replace them has failed. No well-meaning social legislation can possibly take over from millennia of social evolution, it is, at best, a temporary, stop-gap solution. Those strata of society which can afford to purchase substitutes for these institutions (the soccer mom comes to mind as our modern icon of this) can hold together a bit longer, but the signs of stress are showing up there, too. Those that cannot will fall apart.

It is tempting to blame political or legal factors, but this breakdown in society is occurring throughout the industrial world, under a variety of different and economic and social systems. Communities are breaking down, and humans are communal organisms. The only other alternative, to live independent and isolated lives, (so-called rugged individualism) requires financial resources no society can distribute equitably to all its people. It was possible in the eighteenth century frontier, but not the eighteenth century plantation, and not today except for the fortunate few.

First, I don't see this as the end of the world. For starters, it has happened before. We underwent social/cultural upheaval when we went from hunter/gatherer to agruicultural/settled comunities; when we went from self-supporting villages to major cities, and whenever we made fundamental changes in our social arrangements, slave-empire to feudal-serf, agricultural to industrial, rural to urban, petty bourgeios capitalism to finance capitalism, and now energy-based to information- based post-industrilaism. Many of these transitions wrecked the societies they occurred in.

If any of these transitions can teach us anything, it is that there will be much unnecessary suffering, and conflict which will threaten progress and survival for all. But It also should have taught us to recognize the changes for what they are and put them in context. We at least now know enough about history to avoid making the same mistakes over again. And the biggest mistake of all is to assume that there is a one-quick-fix solution for the problem.