A teenager stands before a judge; another statistic in a system that pretends utter surprise at his presence. He grew up three blocks away from the courthouse, in a rundown neighborhood that police patrol because “that’s where the crime is.” Where the closest grocery store is a 20 minute drive away, that is, if you can afford the gas to make the trip. His school lost its music program the same year it gained metal detectors. He’s here for theft.

Some will call this a personal moral failing; another “bad apple” or misled youth. But the truth is we’re looking at the wrong culprit entirely.

For way too long, we’ve wrapped ourselves in a comfortable fiction; that crime emerges from individual moral deficiency. That people who break laws are simply bad actors making bad choices in a vacuum. It’s a lazy narrative and one that asks nothing of us, demands no self-examination, requires no sacrifice. It’s also fundamentally, demonstrably wrong.

Crime is not at all a virus that infects people randomly. It’s a symptom of societal fractures we’ve chosen not to mend.

The Structural Violence We Refuse to Name

Walk through any community with high crime rates and you’ll find the same patterns of abandonment. Not moral abandonment by residents, but systemic abandonment by the society that surrounds them. Schools that haven’t had updated textbooks in a decade. Job centers where the listings haven’t changed in months because there are no jobs. Mental health services that exist on paper but have six-month waiting lists. Public transportation that stops running before evening shifts end.

Flint Water Crisis

In Flint, Michigan, officials chose to switch the water source to save money, poisoning an entire city’s children with lead, a toxin known to increase aggression and reduce impulse control. Between 6,000 and 14,000 children were exposed to dangerous lead levels. Years later, we wonder why crime persists there, ignoring that researchers expect to see increases in teen pregnancies, violent crimes, and incarcerations as these poisoned children reach adolescence. Ten years later, community members continue to grapple with long-term physical and mental health problems, including high rates of depression and PTSD.

Detroit’s Public School System

In Detroit, the city closed nearly 200 schools between 2000 and 2015, leaving entire neighborhoods without educational infrastructure. When schools close in already struggling communities, the soul of that neighborhood dies, residents testified. The closures created a cycle where high unemployment led to increased crime, which caused families and teachers to move elsewhere, and then low enrollment put remaining schools on the chopping block.

These aren’t accidents. They’re deliberate choices; budgets and funding set and hand-chosen by Boards of Commissioners and other community leaders about spending on what is “more important.” And we don’t have to look very far to find it in action with devastating consequences.

What The Research Actually Shows

The evidence is overwhelming. A meta-analysis examining 114 studies found that poverty and income inequality are each strongly associated with violent crime, with 97 percent of correlations being positive. Research consistently tells us that neighborhoods with high poverty exhibit the highest levels of delinquency and criminality, and these patterns create long-term damage, persisting over decades even when neighborhood populations change dramatically, indicating that structural conditions contribute to crime above and beyond individual disposition.

This isn’t some big mystery. It’s blatant cause and effect that researchers across multiple countries have documented: income inequality and unemployment increase crime rates, while targeted social spending and economic improvements reduce them.

The Illusion of Individual Responsibility

America loves the concept of individual responsibility because it requires absolutely nothing of us collectively. It lets us sleep soundly while children go to schools that feel like prisons, in neighborhoods where lead paint and contaminated water slowly erode their cognitive development. When those children later struggle, we call it personal failure rather than recognizing the poisoning we allowed.

Consider the logic we apply nowhere else: when a bridge collapses, we don’t blame drivers for poor moral character. We investigate structural failures, hold engineers accountable, demand better standards. When cancer clusters appear near industrial sites, we don’t lecture victims about resilience. We examine the environmental causes.

But when crime concentrations appear in communities we’ve systematically disinvested from, we somehow discover a convenient outbreak of moral deficiency? The intellectual dishonesty is absolutely staggering. And unforgivable.

In Chicago’s South Side, children in certain neighborhoods experience PTSD at rates dramatically higher than the general population. About 60 percent of women who witnessed trauma in one South Side study had PTSD, compared to 20 percent in the general population. Residents living in crime “hot spots” reported significantly more symptoms of depression and PTSD compared with residents in areas with less concentrated crime. We’ve created these conditions through decades of segregation, disinvestment, and abandonment. Then we incarcerate the traumatized for responding to trauma exactly as human psychology predicts they will.

It’s a shell game to prevent any of the blame from falling on the people who control community purse strings.

The Systems We Break and Blame Others For Breaking

Every robust study on crime points to the same root causes: poverty, lack of opportunity, untreated trauma, educational failure, absence of mental health care, employment discrimination. These aren’t individual problems with individual solutions. They’re systemic problems that require systemic responses.

And yet here we are; we’ve spent fifty years doing the exact opposite. We’ve gutted social services while expanding prisons. We’ve criminalized poverty while refusing to address its causes. We’ve created a school-to-prison pipeline, then expressed shock when it operates exactly as designed.

The Marshall Project documented how America’s jails have become the largest mental health facilities in the country; Cook County Jail in Chicago, Los Angeles County Jail, and New York’s Rikers Island now house more mentally ill individuals than any psychiatric hospital. In Chicago, since 2009, the city has closed six mental health clinics while between 2009 and 2012, the state cut $113.7 million in funding for mental health services. This didn’t happen because of a sudden epidemic of moral failure. It happened because we cut off critical health services and provided absolutely nothing in their place.

The Violence of Inaction

There’s violence in pulling a trigger, certainly. But there’s extreme violence in voting to cut school funding. Violence in refusing to regulate lead in housing. Violence in designing healthcare systems that price out the poor. Violence in creating food deserts, in eliminating bus routes, in closing libraries and community centers. Violence in creating legal systems that intentionally destabilize families.

We’ve committed unspeakable structural violence against entire communities for decades, and then criminalized their trauma responses for profit.

The teenager in that courtroom? His “moral failing” was being unlucky enough to be born into a society that failed him first. He attended schools we refused to fund, lived in housing we allowed to deteriorate, breathed air we permitted to be polluted, and tried to find work in an economy we’d already abandoned him in. His crime is real, but it’s rooted in a soil we mixed and tended. He bloomed where he was planted.

What Accountability Actually Requires

Real accountability means acknowledging that crime isn’t something that magically happens to society; it’s something society intentionally creates through its choices. Through the schools we underfund, the healthcare we ration, the opportunities we hoard, the neighborhoods we write off.

It means recognizing that every person we incarcerate for crimes born of desperation is an indictment not of their morals but of our priorities. That every community with high crime rates is a community we’ve failed, not one that has failed us.

Thankfully, some states are attempting different approaches.

Richmond, California: Treating Gun Violence as a Public Health Issue

In Richmond, California, the city implemented the Office of Neighborhood Safety, which treats gun violence as the public health issue it is rather than purely a criminal justice matter. They provide intensive support, mentorship, and even stipends to the individuals most likely to commit or be victims of violence.

Camden, New Jersey: A Testament to Community Oriented Poilicing

In Camden, New Jersey, officials disbanded the entire police force in 2013 and rebuilt public safety from the ground up, emphasizing community relationships and de-escalation. Since 2012, Camden has seen a 42 percent decrease in violent crime, and by 2024, homicides had dropped 75 percent from 2012 levels. They also invested heavily in economic development, youth programs, and neighborhood revitalization. The city didn’t just change how it policed crime; it changed the conditions that we know without a doubt create it.

Norway: Social Problems Require Social Solutions

In Norway, where the recidivism rate is around 20 percent compared to America’s 68-76 percent, prisons focus on rehabilitation and maintaining human dignity rather than punishment. Incarcerated individuals live in conditions designed to prepare them for successful reintegration, with cells that resemble dorm rooms and access to education, job training, and vocational programs. The difference isn’t that Norwegians are morally superior (though I would argue they may be smarter); it’s that their system treats crime as a social problem requiring social solutions. In the 1990s, Norway had recidivism rates upwards of 70 percent (similar to the U.S. today) when they operated a largely punitive system. After reforming toward rehabilitation, rates plummeted.

The Choice Before Us

Today, we face a moral choice: we can continue pretending crime is solely an individual moral problem, or acknowledge the societal moral failures that create conditions where crime flourishes.

The first option is easier. It requires nothing but continued finger-pointing and prison expansion. It lets us sleep well while cities crumble and communities fracture.

The second option demands everything: investment in schools that actually educate, creation of jobs that actually sustain, provision of healthcare that actually heals, building of communities that actually function. Perhaps most importantly, it requires admitting we’ve been wrong, that we’ve caused harm, that we owe repair.

It requires recognizing that the teenager before the judge isn’t there despite society; he’s there because of it.

A Reckoning Deferred

Every society gets the crime rate it creates through its choices. We want less crime? Well then we need to create fewer desperate people. Provide real opportunities, genuine mental health care, functioning schools, livable wages, affordable housing. Invest in communities instead of abandoning them.

The alternative is we keep doing the same messed up things we’re doing: breaking systems, breaking communities, breaking people, then stomping our feet and expressing moral outrage when they exhibit the entirely predictable fractures we’ve inflicted.

The crime we should be investigating isn’t happening in the streets. It’s happening in legislative chambers and corporate boardrooms and budget meetings, where we repeatedly choose punishment over prevention, incarceration over investment, abandonment over accountability.

The Brennan Center for Justice found that increased incarceration accounted for only about 5 percent of the crime decline since the 1990s, while economic improvements and targeted social programs played far larger roles. We know what works. We simply refuse to do it at scale.

The moral failure isn’t in communities struggling with crime. It’s in the society that created those conditions and now points fingers at its own handiwork.

We Built This City

We built this; every square inch of it. The only question is whether we’re ready to admit it and whether we’re willing to do the hard, expensive, unglamorous work of building something better.

The teenager will finish his sentence eventually. He’ll return to the same broken systems, the same absent opportunities, the same structural violence we’ve decided is normal. And when he’s back before that judge, we’ll tut about wasted potential and call it recidivism. We’ll call it moral failure. We’ll call it anything except what it actually is so we don’t feel guilty or bad for what we’ve done. At the end of the day, it’s proof that we’ve learned nothing, changed nothing, and chosen to keep breaking people rather than fixing what we broke.

That’s the real crime. And we’re all complicit.

Additional Reading

For more information on evidence-based approaches to reducing crime through addressing root causes, visit the Vera Institute of Justice and the Equal Justice Initiative.

Structural Abandonment & Environmental Harm

Education, Trauma & Crime

Mental Health & Incarceration

Poverty, Policing & Policy Failure

Models That Worked

Evidence-Based Reform Organizations

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Last Update: January 21, 2026

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