Lightfoot’s ‘Whole Of Government’ Approach Won’t Reduce Violent Crime. Two Committed Parents Will. – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot last week announced a new, multi-agency Community Safety Coordination Center to align government and nonprofit resources to “holistically reduce and prevent violence in Chicago’s communities.”

It’s part of her “whole of government” approach to reducing violence, she said.

It’s an example of what’s now all too common – see problem, expect a government solution. It’s the unthinking presumption that government can fix what’s wrong, even when a problem’s origins are mostly social.

“With a greater focus and collaboration across sectors of work, we will break down silos and have more visibility across vulnerable communities,” Lightfoot said, “and thereby be better able to see the problems and solve them, create more opportunities for innovation and importantly, better serve our communities when they need it most.”

The real answer has been staring us in the face for decades. Rarely is there a matter on which data and expert opinion are so consistent — over time, across the world and regardless of political opinion: Two committed parents are the key to ending both intergenerational poverty and crime.

This single chart compiled by the American Enterprise Institute showing the link between unwed births and income would almost be proof enough:

The evidence, however, goes far beyond that chart. An Atlantic column summarized it this way:

The bottom line is that there is a large body of literature showing that children of single mothers are more likely to commit crimes than children who grow up with their married parents. This is true not just in the United States, but wherever the issue has been researched. Few experts… dispute this. Studies cannot prove conclusively that fatherlessness** —or any other factor— actually causes people to commit crimes … But by comparing criminals of the same race, education, income, and mother’s education whose primary observable difference is family structure, social scientists have come as close as they can to making the causal case with the methodological tools available.

The Brookings Institute put it more succinctly: “If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great. The policy implications of the increase in out-of-wedlock births are staggering.”

Along with that lower income comes higher crime rates. “Study after study has confirmed the link between single motherhood and crime,” said a recently published review of those studies from around the world. That review provided “a systematic overview of 48 empirical studies, and the “results suggest that growing up in a single-parent family and adolescent involvement in crime are related since a large majority of the studies shows a positive relation between single-parent families and the level of crime.”

The problem has been worsening. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers, according to Brookings. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites.

There are exceptions. Somehow, some single parents get the job done, and I have nothing but admiration for them. Like most parents who have known the work it takes, it’s difficult for me to imagine how I could have done it alone. But the successful single parents are indeed exceptions as the data cited above show.

There is also a still more tragic problem that often results from unwed births, which is no parent at all. Over 100,000 kids are in foster care across America waiting for adoption.

Fear for them. My dad’s father died when my dad was 16 and his mother pretty much disappeared. My dad ended up with his brother in a Pennsylvania boarding house run by his aunt during the Great Depression. I’m eternally grateful that he and my mom paved the road they did for me, but my dad’s experience left him psychologically crippled in many ways. Many of those homeless kids await a similar fate.

Maybe Lightfoot’s new program will help reduce crime somewhat in the near term, and maybe fiddling with other government programs will help, too, but only at the margins and not in the longer term.

Most importantly, those efforts are no excuse for ignoring longer term solutions that strike at the source of the problem. Reducing unwed births is one such solution and it is urgent, even though the impact on crime and poverty may be years away.

Imagine the difference it would make if this simple message were pounded into the heads of our young people day in and day out, in lieu of so much else of what they are taught: Do not have a child until you have a committed partner.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

** Much of the research on unwed births has focused on “fatherless” homes and the effects of growing up without a male influence because that research came before women began marrying and raising children. I’m not trying to make or imply any point about male influence. That’s a different matter and I personally have no problem with two women raising children as long as they are committed – because I know some who are doing it and doing it well. My point here is solely about the consequences of single parenthood.