Module 18

One of my previous entries discussed inner-city black females. Single black mothers are becoming more commonplace than they were sixty years ago. Often I hear relatives discussing how different the times were when they grew up. When a woman became pregnant, she married the man; doing otherwise was unheard of and shameful. A woman could not, and was not able to raise a child on her own (most of them still hold this view to be true) since her husband was able to find work inside the city as industries such as manufacturing were still located in these areas. As time passed, the industries left and the males were unable to get jobs to support families. The result can still be seen today. Many men, unable to find work, loiter the streets of the inner-city hustling or finding odd jobs that don't bring the promise of gainful employment.

I thought this bit from a congressional testimony was interesting:

Welfare contributes to crime in several ways. First, children from single-parent families are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. According to one study, children raised in single-parent families are one-third more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior.(3) Moreover, O'Neill found that, holding other variables constant, black children from single- parent households are twice as likely to commit crimes as black children from a family where the father is present. Nearly 70 percent of juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes, as do 43 percent of prison inmates.(4) Research indicates a direct correlation between crime rates and the number of single-parent families in a neighborhood.(5)

As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted in her seminal article for The Atlantic Monthly:

The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.(6)

The above argues that single parent homes are suspect to propagating delinquent behavior in inner-city neighborhoods. Statistics that were included within the trail claimed that areas of high crime also saw high rates of children being born out of wedlock and are often raised without fathers.