Comment by braiamp

I grew up poor and that was never an inducement to commit crime. I took plenty of "food I didn't want" off my friends' hands at lunch in middle and high school, but never even thought of crime.

Although my parents weren't rich they still tried to teach right from wrong, respect for others and all the rest.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but there's plenty of examples of rich assholes who act as if money makes them immune from justice.

There's abundant evidence against this belief:

  * Lottery winners do not commit less crime than those who do not win the lottery: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31962
  * Studies of identical twins adopted and raised apart shows that crime is more correlated with genetics than environment: 45% nature vs 18-27% nurture https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
  * "While individual study estimates vary, meta-analyses have suggested the level of heritability of antisocial behavior is approximately 40–60%. Shared environmental factors have been estimated to explain approximately 11–14% of the variance in antisocial/criminal behavior and non-shared environmental influences approximately 31–37%" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6640871/
  * “Black men raised in the top 1 percent – by millionaires – were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-debate/