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).