Joblessness, Poverty, and Neighborhood Crime: Testing Wilson’s Assertions of Jobless Poverty

Political and public rhetoric often tout the detrimental effects of poverty and the stabilizing effects of jobs when discussing issues of crime and disorder. Several decades ago, William Julius Wilson proposed that while poverty has been a long-standing problem across U.S. cities, a “new urban poverty” associated with the massive disappearance of jobs may better explain neighborhood crime and violence. Although scholarship continues to theorize about the unique criminogenic effects of area-level poverty and joblessness, criminological research has not systematically examined the distinct effects of poverty and jobless poverty on neighborhood crime. In the present analysis, we use data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS) to provide the first empirical investigation of how joblessness, separately from poverty, influences rates of homicide and other reported violence across 6,406 neighborhoods in 53 U.S. metropolitan areas. A spatially adjusted, multilevel regression analysis reveals that places with poverty and joblessness are distinct from areas with poverty and no marked joblessness. Analysis by neighborhood further reveals that joblessness has a stronger effect on violent crime than poverty itself in severely impoverished areas. As such, we find support for Wilson’s distinct, criminogenic notion of jobless poverty.