Cities are struggling to find ways to prevent crime. Gunshot detection monitors, increased police presence, better school facilities, safe harbors for children, job programs, etc. are all being added to our communities to try to reduce the terrible violence which plagues our communities. These measures are all fine as short-term palliatives, but what none of them do is address the reason there is so much crime in our cities in the first place.
We have crime because the family, especially in the minority communities which are most heavily represented in urban areas, has all but disintegrated. Too many children are growing up feral with no parental supervision to speak of and especially no father to give guidance and discipline to young boys.
Consider these excerpts from a City Journal article by Steve Malanga who, in the wake of the recent murders of three college students in Newark, tells us this:
Behind Newark's persistent violence and deep social dysfunction is a profound cultural shift that has left many of the city's children growing up outside the two-parent family - and in particular, growing up without fathers. Decades of research tell us that such children are far likelier to fail in school and work and to fall into violence than those raised in two-parent families. In Newark, we are seeing what happens to a community when the traditional family comes close to disappearing.
According to 2005 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 32 percent of Newark children are being raised by their parents in a two-adult household. The rest are distributed among families led by grandparents, foster parents, and single parents-mostly mothers. An astonishing 60 percent of the city's kids are growing up without fathers. It isn't that traditional families are breaking up; they aren't even getting started. The city has one of the highest out-of-wedlock birthrates in the country, with about 65 percent of its children born to unmarried women. And 70 percent of those births are to women who are already poor, meaning that their kids are born directly into poverty.
3,750 kids are born every year into fatherless Newark families.
The economic consequences of these numbers are unsettling, since single parenthood is a road to lasting poverty in America today. In Newark, single parents head 83 percent of all families living below the poverty line. If you are a child born into a single-parent family in Newark, your chances of winding up in poverty are better than one in five, but if you are born into a two-parent family, those chances drop to just one in twelve.
And the social consequences are even more disturbing. Research conducted in the 1990s found that a child born out of wedlock was three times more likely to drop out of school than the average child, and far more likely to wind up on welfare as an adult. Studies have also found that about 70 percent of the long-term prisoners in our jails, those who have committed the most violent crimes, grew up without fathers.
The starkness of these statistics makes it astonishing that our politicians and policy makers ignore the subject of single parenthood, as if it were outside the realm of civic discourse. And our religious leaders, who once preached against such behavior, now also largely avoid the issue, even as they call for prayer vigils and organize stop-the-violence campaigns in Newark. Often, in this void, the only information that our teens and young adults get on the subject of marriage, children, and family life comes through media reports about the lifestyles of our celebrity entertainers and athletes, who have increasingly shunned matrimony and traditional families. Once, such news might have been considered scandalous; today, it is reported matter-of-factly, as if these pop icons' lives were the norm.
Until our society begins to address the real root cause of crime nothing else we do is going to make any significant difference, and our cities will continue to descend toward something like Fallujah in 2003.
So why don't we do something to reverse the course? In my opinion there are two reasons: First, the left would have to admit that its grand social revolution of the sixties and seventies was an abject failure. The relaxation of sexual restraint, no-fault divorce, the view that women don't need men to raise children, along with the corrosive effects of the welfare state all combined in a perfect storm to destroy the family. The left will never acknowledge that this is the root of the problem, but we'll never be able to neutralize the acids dissolving our social fabric until they do or until they are rendered politically irrelevant.
Second, any change would require not only a return to the social mores of the fifties, which seems very unlikely, but it would also require an official stress on the importance of personal morality which would entail making a concerted effort to restore religion to a place of prominence in peoples' lives. This a secular society is ill-prepared and even less willing to do.
RLC