If you can make it win-win for everyone involved, then sure, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Individuals have agency; they are not slaves of any "root cause". The individual decision of a person to burgle may have correlations to statistical characteristics of their situation, but unless we understand the base rate of that set of circumstances we will never be able to address it without restricting the agency of others in that cohort.
And the level of intrusiveness necessary to establish the cohort of individuals requires a degree of surveillance that is ripe for abuse and incompatible with personal liberty.
I see this implication over and over (that poor hungry people steal). Poor people don't often steal. They might pilfer here and there, but they're not doing outright stealing or robbing. I've known poor people, I've lived with poor people and by and large they are not thieves. They may keep something, sneak something, but they are not breaking in and stealing stuff --if they do take things not theirs, it's "passive" (i.e. opportunistic.)
People who steal are often of two types, career criminals, pert of an organized (this can be peripheral) crime organization, or drugged out zombies who could not hold a job. There's a possible third, impulse theft by teenagers --these are low numbers.
It sticks in my craw when people so easily imply poor people steal and burgle. All the hand to mouth poor people who on occasion dumpster dove and all that, did not steal things, break into homes etc.
poverty is not the problem, lack of moral education is.
we teach STEM in schools, but we assume that moral behavior is obvious and natural. we don't teach children why moral behavior is important, and more critically we don't teach that moral behavior includes caring for others, and that doing so will benefit all of us. instead we teach children to compete against each other, and we put them in situations where selfish behavior is the best way to get ahead. at best we try to scare them about the risks of crime, but we don't show them the benefits of being helpful instead of selfish.
no education is going to completely eradicate crime, but i do believe there is a correlation between the quality of education and the amount of moral education and crimerates.
I don't know if you are a parent or have first-hand experience here. But I am and do, and schools spend an inordinate amount of time doing this. Especially in elementary school, but throughout the public education system messages of caring for others are literally everywhere in every possible context.
Even when I was a student this was the case; we had units and assemblies presenting these concepts to an incredibly frustrating and condescending degree.
presenting these concepts to an incredibly frustrating and condescending degree
which means they are lecturing but not really teaching things in a way that let's kids not only understand but actually internalize and apply what they learn.
this is not an easy task. it requires teachers and all school staff to be good role models and much more. i haven't seen that when i went to school, nor do i see it from my kids (although i have to admit i don't even know what i should expect to see, and how much my own shortcomings in this area mess things up)
one thing that i think matters though is that teaching morals needs to include parents, and that is not happening.
the problem with lecturing is that we keep believing that telling someone what to do or how to behave is enough for kids to pick it up and apply.
it may work for math or basic science, but it most certainly doesn't work for moral behavior. that needs to be practiced and children need to be put into situations where they can apply morals and be allowed to make mistakes.
moral education is not a separate subject, but it needs to permeate all learning in school and outside
Point taken. But these days they teach STEAM. Which is a weird way of saying they've gone back to not being STEM. STEM was to focus on the sciency, mathy, technical curricula as opposed to the non-STEM, like art and social things. But to undermine the whole STEM they went and braded regular curricula STEAM curricula so people would think, yeah, it's basically STEM with an "A" in it. Brilliant bastards.
That's not what STEAM is at all. Please actually look up the term before deciding what it means and deriding it (it does deserve derision, but mostly for a terrible rollout and lesson plans that misunderstand it).
I don't think there is _one_ root cause. But I can tell you that burglary is a symptom, and seeing increases in it year over year (outpacing population growth) is a sign of systemic problems.
