Communities have changed. Our society is changing. Sometimes I feel like our law enforcement, the public services, they don't have enough resources to keep up with the changes that we see in our society.
Many of the young people living in inner-city America don't see themselves - I mean, they even talk about things like death and dying. And there's a tremendous loss of hope. And of all the things to lose, I think nothing is worse or more difficult to overcome than the loss of hope.
I had a bad background just growing up as a child.
My own view is that left-wing positions largely come about from resentment - I agree with Nietzsche about this - a resentment about the surrounding social order. They have privileges, I don't. Or, I have them and I can't live up to them.
Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.
Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.
In the decades since my youth, I've witnessed the explosion of fatherless families and an exponential increase in illiteracy and crime.
The vast concourse of people who had assembled to witness the triumphant arrival of the successful travellers was of the lowest orders of mechanics and artisans, among whom great distress and a dangerous spirit of discontent with the government at that time prevailed.
There's a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty.
I wasn't from the streets, but I was in the streets. I had a good family, nice home - you know, I can't say I grew up with nothing... but I chose to hang in the streets.
One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.
No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice.
From a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation.
There are some who praise a man free from disease; to me no man who is poor seems free from disease but to be constantly sick.
Crime is a product of social excess.
I was a very studious student and usually got A's. I did not like school, because I wasn't popular - I was a nerd.
Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.
The main cause of poverty is self-inflicted fear and ignorance.
So many of my relatives didn't get a chance to go to school, and my own Daddy couldn't read or write.
Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.
Economic growth driven by large-scale infrastructure investments without equitable provision of education will leave hundreds of millions of people behind, exacerbating inequality, disillusion, and instability.
The root causes of the gang culture lie right across the policy spectrum - but they can all be found in the same areas geographically: worklessness; family breakdown; educational failure and addiction.
History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.
When I was young, poverty was so common that it didn’t have a name.
Anyone who has lived in an area with high unemployment knows how it erodes social bonds, lowers the resilience of the unemployed and their families, and damages the prospects of the next generation.
