Here's an excerpt from an article about crime and poverty in the USA:

Poverty and Crime

By Joseph Williams, Christian Association for Prison Aftercare; 2007

"A study by McClatchy Newspapers, released in March finds that the ranks of the severely impoverished are rapidly escalating. The study found that the percentage of poor Americans who are living in extreme poverty has reached a 32-year high. Today nearly 16 million Americans live in "deep or severe poverty." This is defined as individuals living at half of the federal poverty line. This drastic rise in the level of poverty extends beyond the traditional ghetto and reaches to suburban and rural communities.

The relationship between poverty and crime has been a controversial subject over the years. Many scholars argue that poverty does not have a causal relationship to crime because there are countries in which poverty is very high but the crime rate is relatively low. I would say that in this country it would be hard to argue that there is not a relationship between crime and poverty. Poor people make up the overwhelming majority of those behind bars as 53% of those in prison earned less than $10,000 per year before incarceration"...
http://www.capaassociation.org/newsletter_N009/Articles/PovertyCrime.htm

**
FWIW, I think that that article would have been better if it had made a distinction between the relationship between poverty and certain types of crimes and if it had considered the relationship between poverty and incarceration. Generally speaking, if you have money to hire good lawyers, you're probably less likely to be incarcerated at all or less likely to be incarcerated for as long a period of time as those who used overworked public defenders.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg regarding this topic.