On June 12, 2000, a 22 year old man named Sandro boards a bus with the intention of robbing the passengers on the bus. However, the attempted robbery soon turned into a hostage situation and therefore, put Sandro at the center of the spotlight where many issues of street children, and their situations, was brought up and questioned. This was because Sandro was a street kid himself and during the hostage situation, made comments about the mistreatment street kids and he received throughout recent history. A couple of topics that surround street kids and Sandro are childhood poverty and its relationship to criminal behavior and the consequences of brutal and inhumane prisons. Sandro and many other street children was a victim of both childhood poverty and inhumane prison conditions. These problems was bound to lead Sandro towards a criminal path and end up opening the eyes of people everywhere to the situation of street children in Brazil following the events of Bus 174.
It has always been said that poverty leads to crime, because the people do not have enough to survive. This has been true since the beginning of civilizations. When someone does not have enough to live, that person would sometimes turn to a life of crime to be able to sustain themselves and/or others. At least, thats what most people tend to believe. .
It is not that people are violent because they are poor. Rather, the long-term segregation of people within neighborhoods of concentrated poverty produces, across the generations, ways of life and household strategies that necessarily adapt to conditions of deprivation. They come to rely on violence as a basic tool for survival. (Sanchez, 2006, p.181) .
In more basic terms, violence is not a result of poverty but it is a result of the segregation between impoverished and non-impoverished people. In Sandros situation, being a street kid, he was a victim of this class-based segregation just like all other street kids were.