Debating Poverty and Crime in the US: from Moynihan to Murray

Abstract

There is a view amongst many academics and policy-makers that ‘what happens in social policy in the United States will happen in the UK.’ The accuracy of this statement is assessed by reviewing debates which focus on the links between poverty and crime in America, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Then, moving on to the twentieth century, broad developments in social policy are delineated, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’. This embodied the belief that the government had at least some responsibility for redistributing income from the rich to the poor by providing welfare services, in the form of various means-tested programmes, social insurance schemes and human capital programmes.