Research shows stable families deter criminality. Here’s what society can do.
Homicides were up in Dallas last year, and despite mixed results for other crime statistics, a record-high 63% of U.S. adults are unsettled about the crime situation, according to Gallup. Those statistics, plus an election year, have reignited debates about how governments should respond.
After dramatic drops in the 1990s and early 2000s, Violent crime—especially aggravated assault and homicide—has risen slightly since 2014, when it reached a half-century low.
The fashionable view—particularly from the political left—is that governments need to spend less on efforts that treat crime as a law enforcement problem and more on initiatives that will address crime’s root causes. This is the view you’ll see in press outlets such as The New York Times; it’s the received wisdom passed down to young students in university lecture halls; and it’s the go-to line of public officeholders that made their names criticizing the police.
The “root causes” view is that structural factors like poverty, underfunded schools, and a lack of job opportunities are the primary drivers of violent crime. There is much to debate about this list; but the biggest problem is with what’s left out: another important structure, the family.
The connection between the family and crime is not a new idea. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson — whose work on the link between institutions like the family and crime spans decades — observed that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictors of … violence across cities in the United States.”
In a new study from the Institute for Family Studies, we, along with our co-authors Joseph Price and Seth Cannon, add to the body of evidence backing Sampson’s observation. We find that cities with above-median levels of single parenthood have violent crime and homicide rates that are 118% and 255% higher, respectively, than cities with below-median levels of single parenthood.
Looking specifically at the city of Chicago, our analysis of census tract data shows that tracts with high levels of single-parent-headed households have 137% higher total crime rates, 226% higher violent crime rates and 436% higher homicide rates compared to tracts with low levels of single parenthood.
What might explain this connection between safe streets and stable, two-parent families? One possibility we explore is that instability and trauma — coded by scholars as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs — are much more common for young children raised in single parent families. These ACEs, in turn, dramatically increase children’s risk of developing antisocial disorders as adolescents and young adults that lead in many cases to delinquent and criminal activity.
Another possibility is that young people deprived of the attention, example and discipline of a father in the home are much more likely to fail in school and work, priming them for crime. In other words, our study and the broader research tell us that too many cities are experiencing a fragile-family-to-crime pipeline.
It’s easy to be discouraged by the fact that the post-1960s-era has seen a massive spike in family instability. Nevertheless, single parenthood has leveled off in the last two decades, the share of kids being raised in married families is ticking up, and there are options worth exploring to revive marriage in America.
The federal government could stop penalizing marriage in means-tested programs like public housing and Medicaid. Public and private schools in our cities could start teaching the “Success Sequence” — which explains how education, work and marriage before childbearing dramatically reduce the risk of poverty and increase the odds of realizing the American dream. And religious leaders, public officials, entertainers and sports stars could get behind a campaign to put marriage before the baby carriage, taking a page from successful campaigns to reduce teen childbearing. Efforts like these are needed because there is no question that stronger families will make for safer streets in cities across America.
Intuitive though it may seem, many have simply lost sight of the fact that society’s first line of defense against criminal violence is a strong and stable family. As the Rev. Shando Valdez, who is fighting the scourge of violence in Chicago, observed, “It is easier to raise a child than to later repair a man.”
Getting honest about what truly drives crime won’t just help broaden our understanding of an important social problem, it will also help reveal the path to policy prescriptions and civic initiatives that can not only shut down the fragile-family-to-crime pipeline but give countless children a better shot at the American dream.
This piece originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News (paywall)
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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most. Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, is the Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a visiting scholar at the Sutherland Institute. Based off a recent report.
Photo by Halfpoint/iStock
