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“Poverty is hell, and the angels are in Paradise/ Driving in their limousine, where everything is nice and clean…” Shadow, the calypsonian.
Shadow sets the stage in his opening lines: one cannot understand poverty without appreciating the wealth on the other side.
Poverty and greed are two sides of the same coin. It is the expression of social inequality, and both lead to crime. The impoverished seek for goods to use, while the wealthy use their surplus to exchange for more power or money.
Being poor is not the crime; the continued punishment for being poor is the crime. On the other hand, some wealthy have no need but desire to be admired or to get more money.
“A poor man living in a teeny-weeny hut/ The children hungry, nothing in the pot/
“He gone by the neighbour to beg for some rice/ The neighbour under pressure, Boy, things ent nice…”
Poverty is the inability to provide for the fundamental needs of your family. Unable to provide for the family’s necessities and no apparent opportunity to do better can lead one to commit a crime.
Being poor means you have fewer chances to improve yourself through education and job openings. This situation gets more complicated because your neighbourhood is likely to be a place where gang membership, drug use and other crimes are prevalent. Despair is a frequent companion.
If you cannot feed your children, shoplifting becomes attractive. If your job pays you less than your needs, doing crimes may become tempting.
The alternative is to work multiple jobs and risk being criticised for your parenting. How does a parent set boundaries for children if they are absent? How can you supervise or read to your children if your work demands your presence over several shifts?
We should ask other questions. Why does the employer or the state not provide benefits that help parents be present for their children? How do we create neighbourhood guardians to supervise children? How can we ensure that children are well-fed before going to school?
“He gone in the big shot area to beg/ A police put a bullet in his teeny-weeny leg/He gone in the courts and he lost the case/The prosecutor say he have a bandit’s face…”
People experiencing poverty face continuous punishment for being poor. Your neighbour cannot help you, but you cannot reach those who could.
The criminal justice system works against you since it criminalises all the things you may choose to do to break the chains of poverty. On the other hand, the wealthy use their wealth to write the rules that would benefit them. Some of them seek illegitimate means to enrich themselves with impunity.
White-collar criminals’ advantage is avoiding their deeds being characterised as criminal. Their power allows them to get away with crimes that can devastate the country. They can abuse their power since the average man does not understand what is being done.
The gaze of the average man is fixed on the streets as he fears the likelihood of being robbed or killed. He has no sense of the millions stolen: millions that would make life better for those hungry daily.
No stigma attaches to the powerful: they have battalions of lawyers to plead their case. They spend the stolen wealth in conspicuous consumption and humiliate the less fortunate.
The wealthy who steal believe they are entitled to the loot and are welcomed in the higher echelons of society. They seek more power to escape the first rounds of wrongdoing.
(Copyright Baloo)
They don the garb of the victim and convince the gullible that they are being persecuted. If they successfully persuade others that they are persecuted, they return to steal more.
The less fortunate are deemed to be failures. They bear the brunt of scorn. They feel powerless and hopeless. But humiliation and stigmatisation create a backlash. Those rejected and unable to find a path forward will create an anti-social group. This group will not share the values of the others in the society. They will be driven by anger.
We witness the outcome: contempt for property and authority instead of respect for property and authority, immediate impulse gratification instead of impulse control.
(via St Lucia Newsonline)
How can we reason with them? We have rejected them. They will use their methods to get respect or to destroy the place.
“[…] Wake up in the morning, and the baby cry/ The sugar pan empty, the milk bottle dry/The little boy child on the mango tree/ The mango green hurting up his belly/
“The young girl bawling, she wouldn’t settle/ She wipe she bumsie with stinging nettle/ Toilet paper they never had…”
Poverty is not necessarily a cause of crime. It is interconnected with crime. However, a more direct variable to crime is childhood trauma and adverse experiences.
Shadow speaks to hunger and the lack of bare essentials. However, child abuse is another outcome of childhood poverty. The predatory stepfather, who believes that his money entitles him to take a girl’s virginity, rips her childhood from her. The mother who remains silent to keep money flowing is an enabler.
How does the child trust anyone? What will tell that child that she does not have to walk with a knife?
Will we, as a society, tackle poverty? Will we make the connection between white-collar crime and the bandits who invade our homes?
Or will we continue to pressure our “picky head, good for nothing”?
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Noble Philip, a retired business executive, is trying to interpret Jesus’ relationships with the poor and rich among us. A Seeker, not a Saint.
To address this complex issue, we need a multi-pronged approach that tackles both poverty and greed. We need to create opportunities for economic growth and development, promote fair and equitable distribution of resources, and foster a culture of compassion and generosity.
While “poverty” exists in many parts of the world, mr Phillip failed to ackmnowledge that there are several types of poverty. It is quite ironic that some of the “poorest” people I know right here in Trinidad, never seem to lack for money to party… I am not saying that poor people should not enjoy a party like others do. I am saying that there is a fine line between “needy and greddy.” Having worked several years in “a poverty eradication,” unit in the Ministry of Social Development” many “poor people” fail to be able to able to set priorities. I also understand poverty from several perspectives as a poor man myself, and as a “sociologist” by academic whatever.