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1. Introduction
According to US Census Bureau’s 2015 report, 43.1m Americans lived in poverty. The poverty rate in California is 20.6 percent, which is the topmost of any state in the nation. The least poverty rates are found in New Hampshire, Vermont, Minnesota and Nebraska, which have near 8.7 and 9.1 percent of their population living in poverty[1]. Based on Gini coefficient, USA has the 45th highest level of income inequality among 176 countries (CIA, 2007). In 2010, homicide dropped from the top 15 causes of death in the USA for the first time in 45 years (Daily News, 2011). Property crimes, which comprise of burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft posted drops between 3 and 9 percent[2] (Figure 1).
In the modern world, criminal and brutal act has become a major fear and has gained an important awareness in term of several researches done by Allen (1996), Kelly (2000), Fajnzlber et al. (2002), Brush (2007) and Choe (2008). There have been quantitative studies (e.g. Becker, 1968; Ehrlich, 1973; Chiu and Madden, 1998; Bourguignon, 2001; Imrohoroglu et al., 2000) in criminology to examine the impact of social advancement on crime tendencies and forms of crime. The norm that promotes unfairness such as inequity and poverty are sometimes considered by criminologists to be strictly connected to the level of crime. A number of economists (e.g. Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman and Norman Loayza) have the same opinion that increasing equality gap creates problems like poverty and crime.
To describe the behavior of criminals, Becker (1968) developed an economic model. He points out that crime is one type of economic activity since offenders consider cost and benefit before committing crime. According to criminologists and economist, one-sided distribution of assets may create crime. For instance, individual perhaps prone to crime because of lack of necessary assets for endurance or by a shortage comparative to what is “consider as normal” in their groups (Patterson, 1991). Theory of relative deprivation developed by Runciman (1966) suggests that income discrimination intensify feelings of deficiency and unfairness, while Blau and Blau (1982) propose that related discriminations can be intensified by race. Famous Psychologists Wilson and Daly (1997) describe crime because of status competition. Their logic is that people at the lower...