1520 Crime-inentally

"Criminentally," my dad used to say, and I'm not entirely sure what he meant, or where the phrase came from. It was probably some less blasphemous version of "Christ Almighty" but every time he yelled it, I thought it had something to do with a crime I had most likely committed as I went about the business of being a five-year-old mischief-maker.
Then again, maybe it was some carryover from the Great Depression, when incidentally, crime was supposedly rampant because the economy was so poor. But actually, if you take out bootlegging gang wars, it wasn't.
And it isn’t this time either. Defying certain long held theories of what causes the conditions for crime, the violent crime rate has dropped to its lowest level in more than 40 years.
Despite things like a cratered economy and high unemployment rates, actual robberies fell by 9.5 percent last year and violent crimes dropped by 5.5 percent.
Which could mean many things; People are so broken and listless they don't even have the energy to commit crime. Or the bulging prisons, filled with three-strikes-you're-outers, are actually keeping robbers and violent criminals off the streets.
Or there are two other possibilities—debit cards and fellow poor people.
Debit cards are the fail-safe answer to violent armed robbery. No cash, no crime. With personal identification numbers, passwords, and bankcard fraud protections, robbing people of cash has gone the route of paying by check—another artifact of the cyberless 20th Century.
Oh, people still get robbed, but it's not a violent crime. It's white collar theft. Worse, they rob your whole identity.
Which leads right to the poor possibility. Rich guys don't carry cash. So most poor people rob from other poor people. And they're tapped.
When you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose.
America, ya gotta love it.