> South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud.

Studies correlating wealth inequality with criminality are less than convincing [1].

    A 2016 study, controlling for different factors than previous
    studies, challenges the aforementioned findings. The study finds
    "little evidence of a significant empirical link between overall
    inequality and crime", and that "the previously reported positive
    correlation between violent crime and economic inequality is largely
    driven by economic segregation across neighborhoods instead of
    within-neighborhood inequality". A 2020 study found that in Europe,
    the inequality-crime correlation was present but weak (0.10),
    explaining less than 3% of the variance in crime with a similar
    finding occurring for the United States, while another 2019 study
    argued that the effect of inequality on property crime was nearly
    zero.

From that same article, Alaska has the lowest wealth inequality in the US and also the highest homicide rate.

Impoverishment doesn’t cause criminality, see e.g. post-internment Japanese-American and early 20th century E.European Jewish American immigrant populations. Rather, the root causes of systemic poverty are strongly correlated with criminality [2]. Which isn’t to say extreme wealth inequality isn’t bad: the French Revolution readily disproves that notion. But the French Revolution is in a different league from property crime.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_economic_inequality...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/16/books/what-is-intelligenc...

[2]: https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/1994/10/16/books/what-is-...