Crime and families

Walter Williams recently penned an article titled "Criminologists Mislead Us." In the article, he points to a study showing that criminologists mislead us because liberal criminologists outnumber their conservative counterparts 30 to 1. Of course they do. Anyone who looks at the facts and attempts to have a conversation about the actual causes of crime is labelled as a racist and pushed out of a job.

The facts are obvious to anyone who chooses to look at them without bias:
- Black males are the victim of homicide 10 to 20 times more often than any other demographic
- Black males commit homicides 15 to 35 times more often than any other demographic
- Black males commit armed robbery 10 to 15 times more often whites
- Most crime is committed by perpetrators who are the same race as their victims
- More than 90% of homicides where the victim is black, so is their killer

The study goes on to say:

Despite the evidence that higher incarceration reduces crime rates, many criminologists argue that “mass incarceration” actually “took minority men out of their neighborhoods, stripped them of voting rights, destabilized families, and sapped already-paltry economic resources from struggling communities.”
Such claims could seem plausible only if one believes—contrary to evidence and common sense—that career criminals contribute positively to their neighborhoods, enjoy stable and functional families, vote, and work. What they did, in reality, was to prey on their neighbors.

After reading this, I can only conclude that the problem lies in the black neighborhoods. Something that many people already know, even if they won't admit it, for fear of being labeled as a racist. This is why housing values are lower in black neighborhoods.

It would be easy to take a racist slant, but I don't think that blacks are inherently more violent or prone to crime. Instead, I believe that the root cause lies in the disintegration of the black family. In black communities, we now have more than two out of every three black children growing up in single parent households. Compare that to white children, where three out of four grow up having two parents in the family. In 1960, that was where black families were: 22% of black children were in single parent homes. 

In other words, children growing up raising themselves are growing up without the guidance and direction that having a parent around provides. Children model the behavior of their role models. This is how we learn to comply with societal norms. When they are young, those role models are their parents. As they approach the teenage years, those role models become their peers. When there are no parents around, the young children model the behavior of the only others that they see: older kids.

So the black community has as its role model the leaders of street gangs. Criminals. This has been the case for nearly four generations. Solve the increasing problems of dads leaving as soon as a woman gets pregnant, and you solve the problems of our society. Of course this will never happen, because the people who could solve it are instead selling away the American nuclear family in exchange for votes. As long as we continue to subsidize single mothers, we will get more of them, and this in turn will erode our society even more.

The wheels are slowly coming off.