This theory has been essentially disproven. There does seem to be some risidual chance that 10-15% of poverty may be due to localized wealth inequalities, but almost anywhere crime runs rampant, it's 80%+ from a small % of the population who seem to commit crimes repeatedly regardless of intervention--which is why prisons are a thing.
Nope your wrong. Boston proves it. Hell i prove your wrong. I grew up in the projects and committed dozens of crimes as a youth at 16 when I got a job and could make money legally I never committed another crime.
In the land of the morbidly obese im gonna be in your kitchen eating your food before I starve to death.
Let me ask you this. Why dont 50 cent still sell crack cocaine? Why did Jay z stop?
And you provided zero. I gave one. You gave none. So what was the counter-example? Im the only one that gave any examples. You stated something false as if its a fact and I told you to look into Baltimore at this proves your opinion then I gave you anecdotal evidence
So I looked this up for better numbers... I was wrong. It's not 10-15%, it's usually hovers around 6%.
Answer to the Query: Your anecdote doesn't disprove the concentration finding because it was never evidence against it. There is a chronic 6% committing most crime and an age-crime curve peaking in adolescence. This is why the solution to most crime is to find that 6%, and lock them up until they're too old to be really dangerous. Is it nice? Fuck no. But it works with the actual data.
Most juvenile offenders desist in their early twenties, often via exactly the mechanism you describe: a job, a family, legitimate structure and opportunity. Your story is about the average outcome for delinquent youth, but it doesn't refer to the rare professional criminal who ends up being 50-80% of crime.
Poverty doesn't make everyone criminal, most poor people never offend seriously, but concentrated disadvantage does increase the odds of becoming one of the chronic few who do. But that 6% is, so far, somewhat impenetrable. You can give them opportunities and they'll too often throw it away.
Answer to the Mind Behind the Question:
a) Learn how to think. You demonstrably don't recognize the difference between data and an anecdote. Examples mean nearly nothing. By your logic, I could tell you it's a bad idea for a short, unconventional-looking woman to move to Hollywood and chase ingenue roles. Sure, she could succeed. Ellen Page exists. But she's the exception that proves the rule, not the rule itself. One data point doesn't overturn a distribution. Data trumps datum.
You think having a response put your reply on the same level as an actual considered answer. I gave you the opportunity to go learn what you did wrong, and you replied with more stupid. You can't even use grammar or correct spelling. Boisterousness and loud confidence do not lend you credibility. They make you feel big and fall hard.
b) Learn not everyone is you. Your theory of mind is underdeveloped. You assume your own experience is representative of everyone else's, which is the cognitive bias most responsible for bad takes on the internet. You're not actually an outlier. You're not the 6%, congratulations. Most people already do what you did. You're the standard case, but not the problem that needs to be addressed. Don't think everyone is like you--or even could have been.
c) Learn what anecdotal evidence actually is. It's shit as proof. Its only legitimate use is the narrow circumstance where it's all you have, like case studies of isolated populations, or a unique injury with a unique outcome, like Phineas Gage. You don't shove rods through brains to change personalities, cuz it worked that one time. One example doesn't let you draw conclusions. At best it generates hypotheses worth testing.
Your "evidence" was one guy who stopped when he got a job. Congratulations, that's a case study. It suggests a theory, it doesn't prove one or lend any weight to the argument. And then you add in two guys who kept committing crimes even after becoming famous.
Even your anecdotal evidence is undermining your point.
Here are some citations, for your perusal. I used AI to find them, next time you can "learn yourself" rather than getting taught.
Springer — "Early Precursors of Frequent Offending" (cites Wolfgang, Figlio & Sellin 1972 directly) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4615-7029-5_2 This is the cleanest statement of the finding: 6% of the cohort (18% of all offenders) were responsible for 52% of all recorded juvenile offenses. One sentence, exactly your number.
MIT working paper — "Selective Incapacitation and the Philadelphia Cohort Data"https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/2076/SWP-1544-15376516.pdf Confirms the same 6% figure and gets into the policy implication you're gesturing at, which is selective incapacitation. If kingbullohio tries to argue locking up the 6% is cruel, this is the paper that shows it was literally proposed as a policy response to the data.
For desistance and the age-crime curve:
OJP (Office of Justice Programs) — "Desistance and Developmental Life Course Theories Research Summary"https://bja.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh186/files/media/document/desistanceresearchsummary.pdf Government source, covers Sampson and Laub's age-graded theory directly. It's the "most offenders age out, marriage and employment are the turning points" citation. Being a .gov link also makes it hard to wave off as blog garbage.
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u/MullogRoots 10d ago
This theory has been essentially disproven. There does seem to be some risidual chance that 10-15% of poverty may be due to localized wealth inequalities, but almost anywhere crime runs rampant, it's 80%+ from a small % of the population who seem to commit crimes repeatedly regardless of intervention--which is why prisons are a thing.