Officials: Crime symptom of breakdown of family

ALBANY — Local, state and federal policymakers have long postulated that the root of crime is poverty, while either ignoring or simply failing to address the link between illegitimacy and lack of family involvement to violent crime.

It is an age-old connection, poverty and crime, and as a risk factor, poverty is a powerful contributor, one that was recognized more than 1,800 years ago.

According to author Robert D. Ramsey in the book “Well Said, Well Spoken,” former Roman soldier turned Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelious (121-180 A.D.) declared, “Poverty is the mother of crime.”

This sentiment has been echoed across time and has found its way into the talking points of public officials, politicians and a growing number of disillusioned citizens in Albany, across the nation and around the world.

With statistics showing 33.8 percent of Albany’s population living at or below the poverty level, lack of material success seems to be a powerful argument for the city’s escalating violent crime.

Murders per year have increased twofold since 2015 in Albany when the city had eight murders. In 2016, that number rose to 15 and now, in 2017, Albany has had 20 murders already.

Recently, city leaders declared war on crime, convened a special panel and formed an anti-violence collaborative to deal with the rising number of deaths. Slowly, those leaders are beginning to recognize the connection between the breakdown of American families, more specifically, Albany families, and the violence plaguing the city.

Ward II Albany City Commissioner Jon Howard pointed out, at an Anti-violence Collaborative meeting on Oct. 24, the alarming number of babies born out of wedlock in Albany.

“I want to know why these kids are out at 2 or 3 a.m., shooting each other,” Howard said. “Where are their parents? I don’t know how you do it, but we have to address the family. I have a slogan: ‘If you can’t feed ‘em, don’t breed ‘em.’ Too many of our individuals in our community, if you pull the stats from Phoebe birth rates last year, you will see that the majority of babies that were born last year were born out of wedlock.

“If we don’t address the whole list of problems that are coming out of the households, it could be another generation. We have to break the cycle, and it starts with what’s coming out of the household. It starts with repairing the family.”

According to data obtained by the 2016 U.S. Census, 71 percent of babies born in Albany were born to unwed mothers.

“It’s not a perfect picture of what is coming out of the households,” Howard said. “These are systemic problems that we have to address. We are dealing with a fatherless generation. If you look at a lot of our social problems — mental health, substance abuse and incarceration — those problems are coming out of fatherless homes. We have to address the hard-core problem that what is coming out of the households today is not the same as when we were coming up.”

As Howard alludes, research strongly indicates illegitimacy and lack of parental attachment have a much stronger correlation to crime than poverty.

According to evidence gathered during a study by Deputy Assistant Secretary for Family and Community Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Patrick Fagan, “The Real root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family and Community,” the rise in violent crime over the past 30 years parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers.

A state by state analysis indicates that a 10 percent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes leads, typically, to a 17 percent increase in juvenile crime. The rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers, and high-crime neighborhoods are characterized by high concentrations of fatherless families.

Data show that the type of aggression and hostility demonstrated by a future criminal often is foreshadowed in unusual aggressiveness as early as age 5 or 6.

Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, more than 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. On the other hand, only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime.

These statistics contradict the traditional Washington approach of throwing money at the problem.

Since 1965, the welfare system has cost taxpayers more than $5 trillion dollars, including a spending increase, in real terms, of more than 800 percent. And yet the number of felonies per capita today is three times that of 1960.

“The professional literature in criminology is quite at odds with orthodox thinking in official Washington,” Fagan said. “Many lawmakers in Congress and in the states assume that the high level of crime in America must have its roots in material conditions, such as poor employment opportunities and a shortage of adequately funded social programs. But members of Congress and other policymakers cannot understand the root causes of crime if they insist on viewing it purely in material terms.

“This view blinds policymakers to the personal aspects of crime, including moral failure, the refusal to exercise personal responsibility, and the inability or refusal to enter into family and community relationships based on love, respect and attachment both to the broader community and to a common code of conduct.”

The welfare system has arguably become a destructive bargain between potential mothers and the government.

“The woman has a contract with the government,” Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Robert Rector said. “She will continue to receive her paycheck as long as she fulfills two conditions: She must not work, and she must not marry an employed male.”

Whatever good intentions were served by the welfare system, Rector contends, the evidence shows that its “perverse financial incentives” have discouraged the pursuit of work and the formation of intact families.

Government policy has, evidence indicates, become a powerful facilitator of the long-term rise in crime.

According to Fagan, the propensity to become engaged in criminal activity develops in children in stages associated with both major psychological and sociological factors that are not caused by race or poverty, and the stages are normal tasks of growing up that every child confronts as he/she gets older.

“In the case of future violent criminals, these tasks, in the absence of the love, affection and dedication of both his/her parents, become perverse exercises, frustrating his/her needs and stunting his/her ability to belong,” Fagan writes.

According to Fagan, the stages are:

— Early infancy and the development of the capacity for empathy;

— Early family life and the development of relationships based on agreements being kept and a sense of an intimate place to belong;

— Early school life and the development of peer relationships based on cooperation and agreements conveying a sense of belonging to a community;

— Mid-childhood and the experience of a growing capacity to learn and cooperate within the community;

— Adolescence and the need to belong as an adult and to perform;

— And, generativity, or the begetting of the next generation through intimate sexual union and bringing others into the family and community.

“In all of these stages, the lack of dedication and the atmosphere of rejection or conflict within the family diminish the child’s experience of his personal life as one of love, dedication and a place to belong,” Fagan said. “Instead, it is characterized increasingly by rejection, abandonment, conflict, isolation and even abuse.”

By way of contrast, normal children enjoy a sense of personal security derived from their natural attachment to their parents, but the future criminal is often denied that natural attachment.

“In my experience, I totally agree that the breakdown of the family plays a significant role in our criminal justice system,” Dougherty County Sheriff Kevin Sproul said. “I do believe that it has more of an impact than poverty, even though poverty is a big contributor. Most of the men and women that we deal with are from a lower socio-economic class. Most of our crime is from folks out meeting what they think are their needs. They steal, shoplift, break into people’s homes or cars looking for stuff that is easy to sell or pawn, and I think the family portion, or lack of, is a very important part of that.”

According to Sproul, his father played an important role in his development as a child, teenager and adult, but other kids he knew growing up did not have that authority/father figure in their lives.

“My father, growing up, didn’t let my mother work, not because she couldn’t but because he believed that no matter how many jobs a father had to take, the mother’s place was in the home helping the children,” the sheriff said. “He worked, at times, up to three jobs to make ends meet, but I can remember him putting up a basketball goal in the yard. He would shoot basketball with us or throw the football with us. He coached our Little League team. We did yard work with him. We spent time together. Growing up, you don’t think about those things, but looking back you realize what valuable moments and valuable lessons those were, learned by spending time together.

“I just assumed growing up that other kids had it the same way, but they didn’t. As I got involved in law enforcement and I went to work in the Dougherty County jail six years removed from high school, I couldn’t believe the number of people that were locked up that I knew from our neighborhood or went to school with. Most of those people that I knew were telling me that they had to provide for their family because they were the oldest boy, or they didn’t have a dad, or he had been arrested or something. The same old stories kept coming up of no dad or no mom. This is a theme that I have seen time and time again. When you have a young man or young woman who has been taught how to go out and commit crime, or they are taught the lack of respect for themselves or their families, or not taught anything at all, they don’t how to love and appreciate what God’s blessed them with, which is the opportunity to live.”

Professor of psychiatry, psychology and epidemiology at the Western Psychiatric Institute at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Rolf Loeber contends the parental relationship with a child is a determinate for violent behavior.

“A close and intense relationship between a boy and his father prevents hostility and inappropriate aggressiveness,” Loeber said. “There is increasing evidence for an important critical period that occurs early in children’s lives. At that time, youngsters’ attachment to adult caretakers is formed. This helps them to learn pro-social skills and to unlearn any aggressive or acting-out behaviors.”

Empirical evidence shows that, for a growing child, the most positive and productive environment is a safe and stable home life, according to Loeber.

Today, barely half of all adults in the United States — a record low — are currently married, and the median age at first marriage has never been higher for brides (26.5 years) and grooms (28.7), according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data.

In 1960, 72 percent of all adults ages 18 and older were married; today just 51 percent are. If current trends continue, the share of adults who are married will drop to below half within a few years. Other adult living arrangements — including cohabitation, single-person households and single parenthood — have all grown more prevalent in recent decades.

Still, traditional moral codes the world over offer little support for giving birth to illegitimate children.

“Societies all over the world have recognized that this prohibition is essential to social stability and to raising members of each new generation with the proper respect for their community and their peers,” Fagan said. “Unfortunately, and with disastrous consequences, this prohibition is ignored today in American society at all levels, but most especially in central-city neighborhoods. It gradually puts in place the conditions which foster rejection and, ultimately, crime.

“Whenever there is too high a concentration of such broken families in any community, that community will disintegrate. Only so many dysfunctional families can be sustained before the moral and social fabric of the community breaks down. Re-establishment of the basic community code of children within marriage is necessary both for future happiness of American families and for a reduction in violent crime.”