As Canada slips and slides towards higher rates of unemployment, many are asking whether this will increase crime. The simple answer is that unemployment and crime rates are not systematically related. It’s not that poverty is unrelated to crime, but it’s just not possible to find any meaningful statistical relationship between changing rates of unemployment and changing rates of crime over the past 50 years.

If, on the other hand, you start looking at our jail populations, you begin to see familiar portraits: most are male, working class or poorer, with little education and few social skills. Poverty is a variable of relevance, but changing rates of employment don’t appear to be critical. Consider, for example, homicide in Canada. For the past 50 years British Columbia has had a rate of killing that is five times that of Newfoundland – a province that for decades languished under double digit unemployment. What drives homicide rates (and most other crime rates) is not unemployment, or even poverty, but two more important variables: culture and demographic shifts.

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