The lower middle class used to live in urban settings, where it would be mingled with the lower classes ; thus some of the guys you knew from high school would end up doing some petty thievery, drug dealing, etc... but you knew the guy was essentially all right, and that he'd come out of jail, find a girl and correct his ways.

Now that anyone with a bit of money lives in suburbia, class segregation is much stronger - the poor are blacks or "white trash". You don't meet any of them in school or at the local bar. Thus the image of felons is entirely based on the fact that they committed a crime ; they are not people you might know, they are thus no longer really human beings.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères