Protecting the vulnerable is moral, productive and protects us all
Poverty is everyone’s favorite explanation for crime. We’re all against poverty already, and every politician already has a plan for ending it, so accepting it as the one true cause doesn’t require us to do anything differently. Also, since no one can make poverty go away, no one has to feel responsible. As an explanation for crime, poverty combines all the virtues of fatalism and cop-out.
The numbers, unfortunately, don’t cooperate. In 2022, according to the Census Bureau, 371,972 New Mexicans lived in poverty. In that same year, New Mexico law enforcement agencies reported a total of 13,064 violent crime incidents to the FBI. The number of violent criminals is even lower than that, given the prevalence of repeat offenders.
Both figures should be understood as approximations, but they reveal a basic truth: Poverty doesn’t predict crime. Most poor people, like most people everywhere, have no desire to harm their neighbors.
Poverty adds to stress in a home, and unrelenting stress leads to all manner of bad outcomes, one of which can be the forms of antisocial behavior we designate as crime. But we should always remember there are other forms of socially destructive behavior that aren’t so designated, or haven’t been designated yet.
A person who lacks a conscience but has education, connections and social poise can do a great deal of damage without ever crossing the line into outright criminality. Crime is only a subset of the larger category of conduct that harms other people. If we could quantify all the conduct that fits within the larger category, I suspect we’d find the association with poverty weakens considerably.
In New Mexico, primary responsibility for ensuring the safety and well-being of endangered children belongs to the Children, Youth and Families Department. The agency has been much in the news recently. For all that’s been said and written about it, though, not enough attention has been paid to its role in crime prevention. The police solve crimes but CYFD could prevent them, if only it were adequately funded and fully staffed with knowledgeable professionals. Consider two recent scholarly studies.
In one, from Australia, a team led by Stacy Tzoumakis linked the records of children with a history of child protective services involvement to the records kept by police. The study followed the children only through age 14. The good news is that more than three-quarters of the child protective services-involved kids hadn’t come to the attention of police either as victims, witnesses or “persons of interest.”
The bad news is that nearly a quarter had done so. Of children placed in out-of-home care, which is to say those who had experienced the worst forms of maltreatment, fully 18.5% had police contacts as both victims and persons of interest by age 14, compared to just 1.9% of the total sample.
The article’s literature review shows that being a victim of child maltreatment increases a person’s subsequent risk of becoming the victim of violent
crime outside the home by 69%. Maltreated children are also more likely to commit criminal offenses. “The more severe and persistent the abuse, the more likely young people are to become involved with the criminal justice system as a perpetrator earlier and for more serious offenses.”
It’s only too easy to see how a maltreated child might become mistrustful, angry and quick to suspect other people’s motives. Besides, thinking long-term makes no sense if you don’t expect to live long. The effects extend over generations, too. The other recent study, by Elizabeth S. Barnert and colleagues looked at parents who had a history of serious childhood adversities. Their kids had a 3.22-fold higher odds of criminal conviction by age 25 when compared to children whose parents had no comparable trauma history.
It’s all horribly unfair. Fortunately, there is much that can be done. The authors write: “Interventions such as nurse home visiting programs and the Perry preschool project have demonstrated strong effects in improving young people’s criminal legal outcomes.” The Perry preschool project provided low-income students with “a stimulating classroom education, as well as weekly home visits that were meant to teach mothers how to best support their child’s development by extending the preschool curriculum into the home,” according to a University of Chicago website.
These programs have been proven to reduce the crime rate over the long term. But implementing them statewide in New Mexico would require sustained financial commitment, in contrast to the one-off miracle cures often talked up by politicians.
Protecting vulnerable children from harm is a core governmental duty. Helping them thrive is the just and moral thing to do. It protects the rest of us, too.
Joel Jacobsen is an author who in 2015 retired from a 29-year legal career. If there are topics you would like to see covered in future columns, please write him at legal. column.tips@gmail.com.