By this I mean the down and dirty version, namely, why is there currently a distinct correlation between income level and and homicide?
My originally, off-the-top-of-my-head answer was that there were simply less rich people than there the-not-so-rich and hence of course we would tend to see more of the not-so-rich getting themselves into homicidal messes than the rich themselves. But a quick glance at any criminological history textbook will show that this wasn’t the case even as recently as a hundred years ago.
Not content to let this question go, I did a little research and found an article (those with University access can read it in full) that gives a fairly reasonable answer the question with some solid evidence behind it. Much to my surprise it has relevance beyond just intellectual curiosity:
The criminological literature consistently reports a negative relationship between social status and interpersonal homicide. Regardless of the setting studied, homicide tends, with just a few exceptions, to be concentrated among low-status groups, such as the poor, the unemployed, the young, and cultural minorities. Yet robust as it is, this relationship is confined to modern societies. In the premodern era, homicide was found at all levels of the social hierarchy, including its higher echelons.
What explains these facts? Why is homicide largely confined to low status people today but was not in the societies studied by anthropologists and historians? Why has elite homicide declined? The answer developed here builds on a theory advanced by Donald Black (1983), which argues that violent conflict is a function of the unavailability of law. In modern societies, low social status and law are antagonistic, and the result is that legal means of resolving conflict are effectively unavailable to those at the bottom of the social pyramid. In earlier societies, law tended to be unavailable to everybody, irrespective of their social standing.
