Let’s start with a cold, hard fact. Crime is a lousy career choice and thus the vast majority of criminals are poor. It’s just the way it is. Thus, poor folks are forced to live with a disproportionate number of criminals in their midst.
It’s not that poverty causes crime—a sad but common prejudice among far too many—but that criminals live in poorer areas since they themselves are poor.
The astute commentator H. L. Mencken noted this bigotry. “The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor,” he wrote.
Yes, there is far more crime in poor areas than in wealthier ones but that isn’t due to some moral failings of the poor but rather the reality that most criminals are concentrated in their neighborhoods and they are forced to deal with this.
The result of this is the vast majority of the crimes committed by these criminals will be against people whose only failing is they don’t make enough money to move out of their crime-ridden neighborhood.
It is a mathematical certainty that poor folks will be the primary ones forced to pay for any policies that allow criminals to stay on the streets.
So, if you truly care about poor folks, you will not support these types of actions. You might feel some moral gratification by supporting some of these “feel-good” policies but it will be the poor who will pay the price for your ego.
And I’m fairly certain that the mom crying over her child’s lifeless body or the woman who was just violently raped or the person pistol-whipped during a robbery will not consider assuaging your ego to being worth the cost.
If you truly care about the poor among us, you will support taking violent criminals off the street. Period.