National Review Online-5/02/00 6:30 p.m.
Fatherlessness: The Root Cause
The link between crime and fatherlessness is astonishing.
By Dave Kopel, Independence Institute
Roger Clegg�s article detailing the continuing rise in
illegitimacy rates is terrible news not just for the children
themselves, but for every potential crime victim in America. For
all the talk about the complexities of the �root causes� of
crime, there is one root cause which overwhelms all the rest:
fatherlessness.
As Pat Moynihan wrote in 1965: �From the wild Irish slums of the
nineteenth-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of
Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American
history: A community that allows a large number of young men to
grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring a
stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any
rational expectations about the future � that community asks for
and gets chaos� [In such a society] crime, violence, unrest,
unrestrained lashing out the whole social structure � these are
not only to be expected, they are virtually inevitable.�
A Detroit study found that about 70 percent of juvenile homicide
perpetrators did not live with both parents. Another study found
that of girls committed to the California Youth Authority (for
serious delinquents), 93 percent came from non-intact homes.
Nationally, seventy percent of youths incarcerated in state
reform institutions come from single-parent or no-parent homes. A
survey of juvenile delinquents in state custody in Wisconsin
found that fewer than 1/6 came from intact families; over
two-fifths were illegitimate.
Said one counselor at a juvenile detention facility in
California: �You find a gang member who comes from a complete
nuclear family, a kid who has never been exposed [to] any kind of
abuse, I�d like to meet him� a real gangbanger who comes from a
happy, balanced home, who�s got a good opinion himself. I don�t
think that kid exists.�
Young black males from single-parent families are twice as likely
to engage in crime as young black males from two-parent families.
If the single-parent family is in a neighborhood with a large
number of other single-parent families, the odds of the young man
becoming involved in crime are tripled. These findings are based
on a study conducted for the Department of Health and Human
Services by M. Anne Hill and June O�Neill of Baruch College. The
study held constant all socioeconomic variables (such as income,
parental education, or urban setting) other than single
parenthood.
Crime has often been thought to be a problem of race or poverty,
since poor people and racial minorities comprise a larger portion
of the violent criminal population than of the population as a
whole. But in fact, the causal link between fatherlessness and
crime �is so strong that controlling for family configuration
erases the relationship between race and crime and between low
income and crime,� as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted in her famous
�Dan Quayle was Right� article.
William Niskanen, chairman of the Cato Institute, observes that
most variables that are said to determine the crime rate have not
changed since 1960. Male unemployment, the poverty rate, and the
percentage of church members has stayed approximately the same.
Urbanization has increased slightly but hardly enough to explain
crime search. Since 1960, real personal income per capita
doubled, and so has the number of police per capita. �The one
condition that has changed substantially,� Niskanen writes, �is
the percentage of births [to] single mothers, increasing to 5
percent in 1960 [and] to 28 percent in 1991.� (And, as Clegg
explains, to an even higher rate in 1999.)
There is another association between illegitimacy and crime:
unwed fathers are more likely to commit crimes than are married
fathers. If you see two young men walking towards you on a
lonely, dark street, you may start to worry. But if one of the
men is holding the hand of a small child, your worries vanish.
Marriage and mating really do civilize men, but mere sex and
reproduction do not.
Although misguided welfare policies helped spur the rise in
illegitimacy, the continued growth in illegitimacy,
notwithstanding welfare reform in 1996, suggests a widespread
breakdown in social mores, extending far beyond the ranks of
welfare recipients. How to fix that problem is the most important
question for persons who care about crime control in the long
run. Compared to the disaster of illegitimacy, almost everything
else on today�s �anti-crime� agenda is a trivial distraction.
Speaking at the 1999 NRA Convention in Denver, the late Vikki
Buckley (Colorado�s Secretary of State) brought the crowd to its
feet when she explained: �Those who would run the NRA out of town
need to look at our own children who are engaging in
irresponsible sex and having children they cannot take care of.
Such irresponsible sex is a new age hate crime � raise as much
heck about that as you do the NRA and you will save more lives in
5 years than are taken with guns in a century.�
Citations for the material in this article can be found in
Kopel�s book Guns: Who Should Have Them? (Prometheus Books,
1995).
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