Head
Strong | Society fails because families do
A study shows that homes without both parents have a higher
chance of being involved in violence.
April 22, 2007
By Michael Smerconish
You've offered yourself for
public service. You've appeared at countless candidate forums. You've published
platforms and taken positions on matters of public concern. To a person, you
deserve the praise Theodore Roosevelt offered to the "man in the
arena."
But now, time's short. The
election is one month away. And the city has an unprecedented problem with
violence. While each of you has offered plenty of proposals for curbing the
rising homicide rate in the city, those proposals (more cops and cameras; job
creation; stop-and-frisk; stanching the flow of guns) have been addressed
mostly to manifestations of crime rather than to its root causes.
Perhaps that's because
discussion of what drives violence is sometimes not politically correct, and
often brings out intemperate speech. But the stakes are too high to remain
silent. We need to talk. And I believe we can do so at a level that spurs
public discourse without demagoguery. So allow me to attempt to begin the
dialogue.
I posit the following: that
Philadelphia, like much of the nation, has a family problem, more than a firearm
problem.
Consider:
A U.S. Census survey
released in late 2006 shows that married couples with children now occupy fewer
than one in every four households - the lowest ever recorded, a figure that has
declined by half since 1960. Households with married couples and their children
are now the exception, not the norm. Marriage rates have declined, and social
scientists say it's becoming an institution for the affluent and well-educated
more than for other income groups.
Meanwhile, more babies are
being born out of wedlock. And the rates of such births follow a disturbing
pattern. About one-third of first births among white women occur before
marriage, compared with three-quarters among black women, according to a recent
review of research on cohabitation coauthored by University of Michigan
professor Pamela Smock and Wendy D. Manning of Bowling Green State University.
The bottom line? A dismaying
proportion of children - especially poor, urban children - are growing up
outside of a married, two-parent household.
Just what does that have to
do with violence?
Plenty, according to experts
such as Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the department of sociology and the
Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He
believes those children are the most susceptible to the violence that plagues
our city.
Sampson has published
extensively on the link between youth violence and the marital status of their
parents. In a study of Chicago neighborhoods he coauthored in the February 2005
American Journal of Public Health, the odds of perpetrating violence were 85
percent higher for black youths than those for white youths - and the marital
status of a youth's parents was a key determinant of those odds. The presence
of married parents was linked to a lower probability of violence among young
people, and it also significantly lessened the disparity in violence between
black youths and white youths.
A separate 2006 study
coauthored by Sampson affirms the benefits of marriage for the children, as
well as for married men themselves. There, Sampson and coworkers closely
followed a sample of 500 at-risk men from adolescence to age 32, reporting a
"significant reduction" - 35 percent - "in the probability of
crime" among those men when they were married.
To sum it up: There's a
correlation between the presence of a coherent family unit, marriage, and a
reduction of violence. Unfortunately, we're seeing fewer and fewer married
couples with children, particularly in the city.
Candidates: None of you
seems to be focused on these things.
And yet, they may explain
why, according to the Violence Policy Center, blacks, who are only 13 percent
of the nation's population, make up nearly half of all homicides. Pennsylvania
- no doubt because of Philadelphia's family problem - led the nation in both
number of black homicide victims (398) and black homicide rate per 100,000
(29.52) in 2004. That homicide rate was six times the national average.
Perhaps this dysfunctional
family dynamic may also provide insight into violence in Philadelphia public
schools, and the deaths, reported by The Inquirer investigation into the city
Department of Human Services, of more than 20 children in the last three years
despite their having come to the attention of the DHS.
Above all, it could help
explain why the homicide rate has already risen to triple digits this year.
Sampson told me things I
wish we would hear from you candidates. Things like this: "If I were in
charge of policy, I would point to the link between many different social
phenomena. We tend to divide this up and talk about the police for crime. But
the fact of the matter is, a lot of things go together. Infant mortality, low
birth weight, school dropout, teenage pregnancy. These all cluster in the same
neighborhoods.
"We tend to only talk
about one or two things in terms of policy. Politicians talk about the
criminal-justice system, police, locking people up. Sociologists tend to talk
about poverty. I mean, these are all relevant, but there's a more complex
picture, I think, involved."
Promises to "target
guns" or "add cops," and the rest of the usual menu selections,
will get us no closer to solving the problem. It's time to think outside the
box, even if this issue is too big for any mayor to solve.
Let's have the difficult
conversation. I'm suggesting you address the smallest voting bloc you can find:
the family.
Head Strong |
For "Social Anatomy of
Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence," by Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey
D. Morenoff, and Stephen Raudenbush, go to: http://go.philly.com/sampson
For the Violence Policy
Center Study, "Black Homicide Victimization in the United States: Analysis
of 2004 Homicide Data," see: http://go.philly.com/vpc
For "Does Marriage
Reduce Crime? A Counterfactual Approach To Within-Individual Causal
Effects," by Robert J. Sampson, John H. Laub, and Christopher Wimer, see: http://go.philly.com/sampson2
For "Living Together
Unmarried in the United States: Demographic Perspectives and Implications for
Family Policy," by Pamela Smock and Wendy D. Manning, see http://go.philly.com/smock
Michael Smerconish's column appears on Thursdays in the
Daily News and on Sundays in Currents. He can be heard from 5:30 to 9 a.m.
weekdays on "The Big Talker," WPHT-AM (1210). Contact him via the Web
at http://www.mastalk.com.