Even if some individuals in poverty make it to the top, that’s impossible for the poor as a whole. There can only be so many capitalists, and it becomes harder with every passing year.

One in a hundred American adults is imprisoned, with minorities disproportionately affected. According to Democracy Now! “1-in-36 Hispanic men and 1-in-15 black men are in jail or prison.”

This rate is truly indicative of the social and racial unrest that Americans refuse to acknowledge. By comparison, England and other Western nations only have 1 in 500 adults behind bars.

This 1 percent represents over 3 million Americans, the largest number behind bars in our nation’s history. Alarmingly, 1 in 4 prisoners in the entire world are locked up in America, earning us the highest incarceration rate of any nation- including undemocratic states.

Over the past 20 years prison spending has increased 127 percent to an annual $50 billion. This is another instance of treating the symptoms without curing the disease. As long as America is governed by capitalism with its culture of materialism, unplanned market economy, and law of concentration of capital resulting in an ever wider gulf between the haves and the have-nots, there is going to be an unnecessarily high crime index.

Crime traditionally parallels poverty. Leon Trotsky made the analogy, “When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order.”

People who argue that it’s entirely the unemployed person’s fault he or she cannot find employment or that the prisoner is entirely responsible for being behind bars are forgetting the fact that these adults used to be children. If you look at the conditions children growing up in poverty face, it’s surprising more don’t end up unemployed and in jail.

During my field experience on my way to becoming a teacher, I saw what it’s like to attend a typical MPS school. For many students, the free lunch program provides them with their only decent meal of the day.

It’s hard to concentrate and succeed in school when you’re hungry all the time. As students grow up they may become ashamed to receive free lunches, but society ought to feel ashamed for not providing these children with proper breakfasts and dinners. As the late Benazir Bhutto said, “The child who is starving has no human rights.”

Milwaukee has the fourth lowest high school graduation rate of cities in the US, at some 43 percent.

Poor communities don't have the tax-base to rejuvenate MPS, which is actually divesting in public education through vouchers to private schools, and so can only hire less qualified teachers and lower-quality resources, resulting in less educated students, which makes it harder for them to get good-paying jobs or any jobs at all, which makes it impossible for the tax-base to increase to better fund community education. It’s a vicious cycle.

People who simply fix the blame on drop out students themselves must find it purely coincidental that drop-out rates parallel poverty levels. To them it must appear equally coincidental that crime rates mirror poverty.

Even if some individuals in poverty make it to the top, that’s impossible for the poor as a whole. There can only be so many capitalists, and it becomes harder with every passing year.

Blaming individuals in every case without regard for the socio-economic system in which they live is sophistry. For example, the poorest 50 percent combined earns less than the richest 1 percent, not because they are all “lazy,” but because of the class nature of capitalism.

It’s no coincidence that African Americans only earn two-thirds the wage of white people and are twice as likely to be unemployed. Even though slavery was abolished nearly 150 years ago, there is still enormous racial inequality because under capitalism: the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, owing to the growing concentration of capital.

The people who blame impoverished people for their unemployment and “laziness” entirely fail to criticize the members of the laziest class of society - the capitalist class, which lives off the labor of the working class. Capitalists who own enough capital, regardless of how they came into that position, never have to work, but live off the interest, or unpaid labor of the working class.

When someone claims they got rich by hard work, always ask “by whose hard work?”

Employment is a guaranteed in a socialist planned economy, automatically reducing poverty and subsequently crime - including the crimes of capitalist exploitation which go unpunished today.

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