My friend and colleague Eugene Kane, who is as passionate and precise as any writer I know, wrote early this week about the shameful statistics regarding the rate that Wisconsin puts black men in prison.

We are No. 1 in the nation. And it’s not even close with Oklahoma, which is No. 2.

The numbers are disgusting and everyone who lives here, no matter your color, ought to be asking difficult questions about this kind of statistic.

Kane’s column and the study that spawned it has created a predictable response:

"Do the crime, do the time."

"Maybe we should put more whites in prison so it balances out."

We don’t need to even pay attention to any of those responses.

But there is one overriding question that we should try to answer.

Nobody is born a criminal. There is no inevitability to a kid becoming a criminal. There is something else at work here, and that leads us to the big question.

Does crime cause poverty or does poverty cause crime?

The two are obviously linked. Poor neighborhoods have more crime and and give birth to more crime than do more affluent neighborhoods. There is one school of thought, however, that claims a neighborhood is poor for more reasons than just the fact that there are no jobs.

The easy and most common theory is that if a neighborhood is poor the only way for people to survive is to become criminals. When you don’t have money for food, or diapers for kids or transportation or any of the other for stuff you need, you will turn to crime to get those things.

People who live outside these pockets of crime have a hard time understanding what happens in those neighborhoods that are rife with anti-social behavior. There is a dynamic.

People use need as the stimulus for crime. People need stuff so they go and steal it.

There is another theory, one that requires thinking outside the box and makes all of us pause to get our arms around it. This theory is one that was actively articulated by our former mayor, John Norquist.

Norquist, and others, argue that it is crime that causes poverty. They argue that a high crime rate destabilizes neighborhoods. It drives businesses out. It drives homeowners away looking for a safer place to live. Crime creates a climate that frightens everyone and dissuades any meaningful attempts at turning around a neighborhood.

I agree with Norquist mainly because, as I said, I don’t think people are born to be criminals. There is a lot of research that shows people turn to crime for a wide variety of reasons: greed, disregard for law or order, fun and adventure (believe it or not), drug use.

So where do we put our efforts as a community trying to turn things around? I think we need to deal with the issue of crime. Not with a hammer or a daily onslaught by police. But rather, by activating those measures what will help create a safer area where business can thrive and people can live without fear.

We need help from the people who are there with active, serious block watch programs. We need police to respond quickly to complaints. We need to focus on those quality of life issues. And we need to stop throwing so many black men in jail. Nobody benefits from that. And maybe if we try to so something else, we can move down from No. 1.