Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unemployment itself doesn't cause crime, but unemployment and a weak social safety net will definitely cause crime. I've lived in Western Europe countries with absurdly high unemployment rates, to this American, >10%, 25% youth, and I never felt unsafe, mostly. You got a stipend, subsidized housing, and job training. But in the US, unemployment, desperation, and easy access to firearms can be a big problem. BTW, I'm…
Except there are two problems with this theory. One unemployment is just as correlated with crimes of passion as it is crimes of opportunity. There’s no reason why a lack of job training should lead to rape. Two is that America’s high crime rates well preceded the advent of the modern welfare state. New York had much higher crime than London even in the 19th century at the height of Victorian social Darwinism and Dic…
I think there is a clear reason: nihilism and depression. If you have resigned yourself to being unemployed and impoverished forever, what difference does it make whether you're in jail or not? It's the same reason we argue that jailing the homeless is pointless. They don't care; life in prison might even be better in terms of quality of life. Sure, there's less freedom, but the poorer you are, the less the delta in freedom is. You don't have access to a lot of the freedom that financially healthy people have to begin with. Jailing them is like trying to drown a fish. We don't have any functional punishments for people who don't care about their life (I'm not advocating that we try to invent some).
You mentioned rape specifically. The prevailing theory afaik is that rape is about control over someone else rather than sexual gratification. There are plenty of ways to have sex; the floor on sex worker prices is shockingly low. Doubly so in extremely poor areas. It's not shocking to me that people with almost no control over their lives would lash out in ways that grant them control, or at least a feeling of control. If you're poor and have no safety net, you have little control over your housing (can't afford to move), your job (don't have a rainy day fund to tell your boss to fuck off), your food (you eat what's cheap, or what the food bank will give you), your money (you're lucky if you even have enough to pay bills, much less have money left over that you can pick what to do with), etc. Your life becomes a constant chain of being shunted around and manipulated by people who do have money.
Crimes of opportunity are an attempt to lift yourself out of poverty. Crimes of passion are an attempt to cope with the struggles of living a life that you have almost no control over.
I'm not attempting to absolve anyone of responsibility for their actions, but I can see how someone would make that choice.
Also, suicide is an act of passion, and it's highly correlated with unemployment.