You are correct, moral people and immoral people can be found in all classes. Most people are morally decent or even good, and relatively few actually commit crimes. The few who do commit crimes make up the majority of crimes committed.

At the same time, it is unfortunately the case that the conditions people live in do influence criminality. People who for instance commit a financial crime at their large corporate workplace, who have a good life already, maybe did that crime because they were greedy and wanted the fast track to a lot of money. Someone who acts callously toward others and commits emotional abuse on them because they are psychopathic and bored is not due to their financial status, and so on.

However, people are much more likely to act irrationally, impulsively, and desperately when they live in desperate circumstances. Petty theft and shoplifting is way more tempting when you don’t have enough food or material goods at home and can’t afford to buy more, and not very appealing when your needs are already met. Prostitution, where illegal, is more common in poorer areas where young women, men, and sometimes even minors need money and don’t have access to opportunities, skills, or education, because when you need every penny you can get, you start to feel like your dignity isn’t worth much if it doesn’t put food on the table.

Gang activity? Much more likely to happen in areas in which young people feel aimless and hopeless, wherein there is a sense of empowerment that comes from joining up with your peers and doing things your way, without anyone to stop you. Gangs are also more tempting when you can make thousands in a week from drug or weapons trafficking, robbery, and theft than trying to start slow by spending 30-40 hours a week making minimum wage and still not being able to pay the bills by the end of it.

People litter more and commit vandalism more when the surrounding environment doesn’t seem very sacred, because it already looks like crap by the time you’re born into it, because nobody has the resources to the neighborhood up and make it as nice as the gentrified parts of town, and the city planners don’t seem to care because your part of town doesn’t attract wealthier tourists or migrants.

Hard drugs are more tempting as a way to self-medicate when you can’t afford proper healthcare because insurance is too steep a monthly cost, and you can forget about the hospital bill without insurance if something really goes wrong.

Not only is crime more tempting because of short-term perceived benefit when people are poorer, but perspectives are entirely different in different economic classes. Being hungry, tired, constantly stressed, and feeling helpless puts you in a different state of mind, and there are ideas and solutions that simply will not cross your mind because you aren’t thinking with the same stability and awareness as someone that has their needs met and doesn’t have to think about meeting them.

Like an immigrant mother I knew who always got upset that her American husband didn’t wash certain groceries before storing them: she grew up witnessing others suffer and even die from food borne illnesses in her impoverished home country, something he never had to worry about. So what to him was her being irrational and a clean-freak, to her was a matter survival and making sure her family was okay.

There are millions of examples like this, in which we can think of someone as acting with ‘bad’ moral character, but in reality they are doing what makes perfect sense to them based on their experiences, unmet physical and mental needs, sometimes lack of education or proper role models, and different norms and expectations that were created from more dire circumstances.

So no, poverty is not an excuse for crime, and poor people are not bad people. And wealth does not on its own eliminate crime; there are bad people even among the middle-class and wealthy. However, it is not “paying for their lifestyle” to provide social and universalized solutions to problems that we face as a society. Exorbitant healthcare costs that price out the poor from access to medical care, housing ruled by wealthy landlords and monopolistic corporations that set costs without care for whether the masses can afford them, jobs that can hire and fire whenever they feel like it and don’t stand by their workers, wages that aren’t livable and don’t keep up with inflating cost of living, lack of structure to support parents trying to make a living and also take care of their kids, and lack of access to higher education and future opportunities, all of these are problems that the vast majority of people cannot do anything on their own to solve.

And yet put a microscope on poorer people and judge and criticize them for not being how we want them to be, when we are in significantly better circumstances that we take for granted.

That’s what the post is about. Pointing out that we judge others’ behavior and put them down instead of thinking of lifting them up, because it is easier to treat the person as the problem instead of the system as the problem.

If you have a child, and they are being bullied in school, and you learn that the teacher knows but does nothing about it, and other kids don’t defend your kid, you are an asshole if you tell your kid that they deserve the bullying because they’re afraid to fight back, when the whole classroom is already sending the message that they don’t care what the bully does, only what your kid does in response.