Criminals, Parenting, and Release Proposals

The soft-on-crime movement makes an emotional pitch to convince people to let more criminals out of prison by claiming that incarcerating a parent is necessarily bad for children.  I noted that the premise of this argument was very doubtful in this post last October, citing a newly released study.

Rafael Mangual has this article in the City Journal with the subtitle, Evidence suggests that children are often better off when criminal parents are imprisoned.

Yet the contention that incarcerating an individual is, in most cases, harmful to his family—and especially to dependent children—relies on an assumption that these individuals are capable of being emotionally supportive guardians and reliable sources of economic stability. The evidentiary basis for this assumption is shaky. Considerable evidence suggests, to the contrary, that the struggles of children of such parents—whether in school or in other areas of their lives—have less to do with their parents being incarcerated than with the behavior that led to the incarceration.

Mangual cites several studies to back up that hypothesis.

This makes perfect sense to those of us who believe that the true “root cause” of crime is children’s internalization of the wrong values as they grow up. If a child’s father figure (whether the biological father or not) is constantly engaging in criminal activity and expressing anti-social attitudes, doesn’t it make sense that the child is more likely to engage in criminal behavior when he grows up?

We don’t have a school-to-prison pipeline, we have an attitudes-to-prison pipeline. The sooner the “woke” actually wake up and realize that, the sooner we can make real progress addressing the real root cause of crime.