Correlation between poverty and crime While driving downtown, a driver notices a thin, dirty, bearded man holding a cardboard sign that reads "I will work for food." This is one of many examples of poverty in our nation. What the driver does next in the situation is purely subconscious; the driver comes over, closes all the windows of his car and locks all four doors, this way he is one hundred percent safe from any harm this homeless man might resort to. This is a correlation that many citizens in the United States have identified; when a homeless person, or someone who appears to be below the poverty line, approaches, thoughts of drugs, violence, gangs and crime flood the mind and every precaution is taken to stay safe from any harm these people could potentially cause. However, these precautions have not always been applied. Many years ago an individual could walk down the highway with a thumb raised in the air and ask a stranger for a ride to the nearest gas station, regardless of how it looked, no questions asked. But as time went on, violent criminal acts by those hitchhikers also increased, as it is now a common rule of thumb not to let strangers on the road. There is a huge difference between what poverty looked like then and what poverty looked like now, both in what individuals below the poverty line look like, but also in the numbers that correspond to people below the poverty line. In any case, poverty has always played a key role in crime, then and now. In America there are two very different versions of the word “poverty” used on a daily basis, with two completely different definitions. The first version of poverty, a more commonly known version, is federal poverty… the center of the paper… the Great Depression, and was used to determine how much agencies should allocate to feed each family” (useconomy.about .com). In 2009, the government passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included broad investments to alleviate poverty exacerbated by the economic crisis. To combat hunger, the law provided $20 billion to increase the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and to help maintain sick neighborhoods, $2 billion was allocated in new neighborhood stabilization funds (whitehouse.gov). Despite increasing funding for those below the poverty line, it seemed that the more the government spent on eliminating poverty, the more crime would occur in America. There have been several recent attempts at federal crime control, although with each increase in attempts to decrease crime, crime only gets worse.