There is a very famous American Buddhist monk called "Ajahn Geoff" who teaches this exact thing. Most people WILL commit heinous acts under the pressure of starvation. (And that's why he and other Buddhist monastics urge the taking of the Buddhist moral precepts).

While that's probably true, I don't really see its relevance. I'm fairly certain that exactly zero of the people spending prison time for murder in my country committed murder because they were hungry.

I'm open to the possibility that the situation may be different in other countries, but I strongly doubt it's a leading cause pretty much anywhere.

Well, as Lord Beaverbrook might have said, we've already established that we're all potential criminals. All we're haggling about now is the threshold that would cause us to commit a crime.

Without having lived the lives of others, you simply don't know if you would have committed the same (or worse) crimes in their situation. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't punish crimes, but to imagine that you're a better person than most criminals is just self-flattery.