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Would "spreading the wealth" help reduce crime and punishment rates?

By Douglas A. Berman

This new little criminology paper that just showed up on SSRN, titled "Income Inequality and Crime in the United States," ought to help generate a robust debate on a friday.  Here is the brief abstract of the brief paper: This paper investigates the relationship between income inequality and crime.  Results show that there is a strong and robust effect of relative income inequality on burglary.  Effect on robbery is also strong and robust in most cases. Of course, these results linking economic crime to economic conditions should hardly be surprising.  But, in light of the apparent reality that all sorts of crime and punishment levels often also to correlate to inequalities in wealth (and educational attainment), one cannot help but wonder if Senator Jim Webb's new proposal to "create a blue-ribbon commission to look at every aspect of our criminal justice system with an eye toward reshaping the process from top to bottom" will have to both start and end with "spread the wealth" recommendations...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 27, 2009 (boomark / email).