{"id":58119,"date":"2013-11-06T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2013-11-06T17:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=58119"},"modified":"2013-11-06T12:27:09","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T17:27:09","slug":"does-fatherlessness-cause-juvenile-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/11\/06\/does-fatherlessness-cause-juvenile-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Fatherlessness Cause Crime?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week Kay Hymowitz (who\u00a0sometimes works<\/a>\u00a0out of a PO Box\u00a0rented by Brad Wilcox<\/a>) wrote the following in the\u00a0LA Times<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

As far back as the 1970s, family researchers began noticing that… [b]oys from broken homes were more likely than their peers to get suspended and arrested\u2026\u00a0And justice experts have long known that juvenile facilities and adult jails overflow with sons from broken families.\u00a0Liberals often assume that these kinds of social problems result from our stingy support system for single mothers and their children.\u00a0But the link between criminality and fatherlessness holds even in countries with lavish social welfare systems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah, the link between criminality and fatherlessness again. So ingrained is the assumption that crime rates always go up that conservatives making this argument do not even see the need to account for the incredible, world-historical drop in violence that has accompanied the collapse of the nuclear family. I know Kay Hymowitz knows this, because\u00a0we\u2019ve argued about it before<\/a>. But if her editors and readers don\u2019t, why should she make a big deal out of it?<\/p>\n

In this graph I show the scales down to zero so you can see the proportional change in each trend:\u00a0father-not-present boys<\/a>\u00a0ages 10-14 and male juvenile\u00a0violent-crime arrest rates<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not arguing about whether boys living without fathers are more likely to commit crimes. I\u2019m just saying that this is very unlikely to be the major cause of male juvenile violent crime if the trends can move so drastically in opposite directions at the same time. These aren\u2019t little fluctuations. Even if you leave out the late-80s-early-90s spike in crime, arrests fell about 40% from 1980 to 2010 while father-absent boys increased almost 50%.<\/p>\n

If you are going to argue for a strong association \u2014 which Hymowitz does \u2014 and use words like \u201ctide,\u201d you should at least acknowledge that the problem you are trumpeting is getting better while the cause you are bemoaning is getting worse.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week Kay Hymowitz (who\u00a0sometimes works\u00a0out of a PO Box\u00a0rented by Brad Wilcox) wrote the following in the\u00a0LA Times: As far back as the 1970s, family researchers began noticing that… [b]oys from broken homes were more likely than their peers to get suspended and arrested\u2026\u00a0And justice experts have long known that juvenile facilities and adult […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":58121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,2056,403,55,2088,253,272,274],"class_list":["post-58119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-crimelaw","tag-deviance","tag-gender","tag-gender-marriagefamily","tag-history","tag-marriagefamily","tag-methodsuse-of-data"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/11\/Screenshot_14.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58119"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58159,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58119\/revisions\/58159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}