The most ‘undeserving’ of all? How poverty drives young men to victimisation and crime

Abstract

Public policy reform over several decades has succeeded in systematically impoverishing and worsening the social and economic conditions of poor, single young men. That this group is the most prone to criminality and criminalisation, while being pushed further into the margins of the licit and illicit economy, has been a central feature of long-term and growing crime trends. The article argues that successive governments have been unwise to neglect the poverty of unemployed, single young men into young adulthood. Their comparatively unfavourable treatment (as the most ‘undeserving’ of the ‘undeserving poor’) has impoverished a group renowned for being crime-prone.