Many, many crimes are in effect the result of a superabundance of emotional pain. This pain makes it hard to work, hard to think, hard to breathe. It makes people seek out all forms of relief, in terms of drug and alcohol, but also in terms of violence, which can create moments of release from continual tension.
Armed robbery, rape, assault, car theft (especially by kids), drug use and sale: the list is long of crimes which originate in poor emotional health, itself characterized by chronic tension which that person can find no internal resources to calm.
It is a very worthwhile idea, designing a better society, but no design can proceed from any basis but the generalized individual psychological health of the populace. “Equality” will do nothing. It provides no sense of purpose in life, except for the lunatics who have made coercing the rest of us into it–as they define it–their own sole purpose in life.
All useful solutions proceed from the bottom up, from individual people feeling better and doing better. If we are going to spend $60,000/year or whatever it is keeping people locked up, why not try something which in my view would have a good chance of actually rehabilitating–or, to use the Orwellian word one sees everywhere–“correcting” them.
And the same applies economically as well: a robust, rich economy depends on countless small entrepreneurs, and everyone who puts large numbers of barriers in their way necessarily chooses poverty for those who are not already well to do.
It is likely not overstating the case politically that the Left works intentionally to create and sustain problems in their base, because if the solutions were found, their rhetoric would be shown as empty, and their contributions as negative. You cannot have a massive and increasingly prosperous middle class–including all ethnic groups–and continue to use the propagandistic weapon of class warfare rhetoric.
When one looks at the social history of the Left, there have been long periods of time where their de facto motto was “FUCK the middle class.”