I looked through the 16-page BLS report and 20-page USCB report you linked but didn't see where either said that "the poor choose not to work" or anything close to equivalent to that. The nearest I can find is that people working full-time are less likely to be poor than people working part-time, but if there's anything saying that everyone working part-time does so by choice then I failed to see it.

... I see from another comment you've made that your actual point lies in the background information the BLS report mentions at the start (FFS, would it have killed you to say that at the outset?): 45.3M poor people, of whom only 10.5M are "working poor", from which you conclude that the others have chosen not to work. Well, let's take a look. About 14% of US senior citizens and 18% of US children are in poverty. That's about 14% of about 45M plus 18% of about 70M, or about 19M people. These are not people who have chosen not to work, but people not in a position to do so. So that leaves about 16M people of working age but not in the labour force. What else? There are about 10M people with disabilities in the US who are of working age but not in the labour force. I don't know what fraction of them are not in the labour force because their disability prevents them working, but let's suppose it's only half of those people. (I bet it's more.) That would leave 11M people in the US who are in poverty, of working age, not unable to work because of disability, and yet not in the labour force. Are all those people poor by choice? Well, no; I bet a lot of them are people who have tried and tried to find employment, failed and failed, and eventually given up in despair. But let's suppose I'm wrong and all those people could realistically get a job if they wanted. (I bet at least half of them couldn't.) And let's suppose, optimistically given those working-poor statistics, that all of them could realistically get a job that would stop them being poor. (I bet at least half of those who could get a job couldn't get one that would actually lift them out of poverty.) That would mean that ~11M out of 45M poor people in the US are poor by choice. Less than a quarter of 'em. (My guess, as per my parenthetical comments above, is that the real figure is more like 2-3M out of 45M, but I'm being generous to you here.)

Yes, poor people commit more crimes than rich people, even crimes with no direct connection to money. May I suggest that you take five minutes and see what other explanations you can think of for that, besides "poor people are naturally bad people who do bad things"? I can think of several. Here are a few to get you started: (1) Poor people can't afford to live in nice places; in the nasty places, there is more violence for them to get caught up in. (2) Poverty causes stress and people under stress are more likely to commit crimes. (3) The laws that determine what things are crimes are generally made by well-off people, whose characteristic ways of screwing other people over tend not to be criminalized. If a rich person and a poor person do equal amounts of harm to others, the poor person is much more likely to go to jail.

Yes, poor people use illegal drugs more than rich people, and (you linked to a 577-page document and gave no indication of exactly what bit of it you had in mind) what may be more to the point is that when poor people use illegal drugs it's more likely to mess up their lives enough that it gets noticed. (Because the worse your situation is, the more likely it is that doing drugs makes it really bad.) Again: I suggest that you spend a few minutes really trying to think of explanations other than "poor people are stupid people who do stupid things"; I can think of several. Rather than suggesting some examples, I'll leave this one up to you completely.

None of this justifies the claim that poor people are generally poor because they choose not to do things that would stop them being poor. (It's evidence against a strawman theory that says poverty strikes completely at random and there's nothing at all anyone can do about it. I don't think anyone believes that, though.)

My guess, FWIW: There's a whole spectrum from "ample opportunity for a comfortable life, voluntarily did things that screwed that up and became poor as a result" through "difficult initial situation made it much harder to avoid poverty, failed to do so" and "became poor by whatever means, and the circumstances of poverty make it harder to make the sort of decisions that might get you out of it" to "terrible situation from the outset, never really had a chance", and there are people all along it; everyone's situation is the result of interaction between their character and their environment, and the two shape one another in any case; most comfortably off people, if suddenly made poor without other changes to their character and social networks and so forth, would get out of poverty; but most comfortably off people, if they had been dropped into a situation of poverty from childhood onward, would not have escaped; in any case, responding to poverty with "eh, it's their choice, no point trying to fix it" is not only callous and inhumane but also unlikely to be an effective way of reducing poverty.