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Poverty And Poverty

Decent Essays

Criminologists have been looking at the correlation between poverty and crime since criminology became a real discipline. They do not think the poor are criminals; this is not the case. It is just that the association between poverty and childhood development leading to crime is too strong to ignore. This is probably why many poor and working-class families desire to live in the suburbs, believing that their children will have better opportunities in education and work and that it would be a way to escape from the threat of urban violence. On the other hand, those who live in the suburbs are hesitant of allowing them to come into their neighborhoods because they think that crime, drugs, blight, bad schools, and higher taxes will inevitably follow. With this in mind, one now asks three questions with the first two being psychological and the last being a result of the answers to the first two: 1) Does one’s neighborhood shape who they are? 2) Would one be a different person if they grew up somewhere else? 3) Should suburbs be mandated to rewrite their zoning laws and allow a “fair share” of affordable housing? This work will attempt to answer these questions. The first question is only a stem of that root question of nature versus nurture. For many years psychologists would debate over this question, but the conclusion that has been reached is not one or the other but a mixture of both. So when it comes to this question of whether or not ones neighborhood shapes who that

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