Family, Crime, and Justice

“The family, that is, the group consisting of mother, father and child, still remains the main educational agency of mankind,” King said. Those words can’t top the majesty and call to action of King’s “I Have a Dream” oration, or match the moral teachings of his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But they go to the heart of what’s missing in the lives of the many who are not free to join in this weekend’s festivities.

I think of boys getting guns and girls getting babies. Children who know how to create kids but not how to raise them. And I think of those dreadful numbers behind youth violence and carjackings, high school absenteeism and truancy rates, and the stream of young boys and girls — yes, boys and girls, not the amorphous “teens” — and face how far we have fallen from maintaining King’s “main educational agency of mankind.”

The decline of the family, particularly among black Americans, is not the legacy of nineteenth century injustice. It accelerated beginning in the 1960s. Partly, it was the overall national decline. Yet it was made worse by the welfare state of the Great Society that had been touted as a measure to reduce crime. See this post.

In the end, culture trumps everything. A culture of commitment to family, raising children with moral values, work ethic, and obedience to law would go a long way toward reducing crime in the long run, even if it didn’t affect the poverty that is so often touted as the root cause of crime. But of course it would affect poverty. People who stay in school, refrain from crime, work hard, and have their children within stable families regularly climb out of poverty into the middle class. Cultural change to encourage more people to that is the path forward.