system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does crime cause poverty or does poverty cause crime?

I'm in disagreement with a friend of mine who's quite insistent that poverty doesn't cause crime, that it's the other way around. Is there much truth to this?
gpt
Neither. According to Quinney, in The Social Reality of Crime (1970), he argues that social inequality rooted in class conflict creates both poverty and crime. He also writes about this more thoroughly in Class, State, and, Crime (can't remember year, sorry). Poverty (the have nots) is a state of deprivation that is perpetuated or recreated by social, economic, political, and legal institutions dominated by the haves. Those in power shape the law in ways that (to use a common phrase) protect and serve their interests. Definitions of crime, and the criminal justice system, serve as a key mechanism of social control which recreates social inequality.