Hypercriminals

16 Pages 3986 Words

less homes - this adds up to 19
million children without fathers. Compared to children in two parent
family homes, these children will be twice as likely to drop out of
school, twice as likely to have children out of wedlock, and they
stand more than three times the chance of ending up in poverty, and
almost ten times more likely to commit violent crime and ending up in
jail. (1)

The Heritage Foundation - a Conservative think tank - reported
that the rise in violent crime over the past 30 years runs directly
parallel to the rise in fatherless families. In every state in our
country, according to the Heritage foundation, the rate for juvenile
crime "is closely linked to the percentage of children raised in
single-parent families. And while it has long been thought that poverty is the primary cause of crime, the facts simply do not support this view. Teenage criminal behavior has its roots in habitual deprivation of parental love and affection going back to early infancy, according to the Heritage Foundation.

A father's attention to his son has enormous positive effects
on a boy's emotional and social development. But a boy abandoned by
his father in deprived of a deep sense of personal security, In a well-functioning family," he continued, "the very presence of the father embodies authority" and this paternal authority "is critical to the prevention of psychopathology and delinquency." (2)

On top of the problem of single parent homes, is the problem
of the children whose behavioral problems are linked to their mothers'
crack use during pregnancy. These children are reaching their teenage
years and this is "a potentially very aggressive population,"
according to Sheldon Greenberg, director of Johns Hopkins University's
Police Executive Leadership Program. What's more, drug use has more than doubled among 12- to 17-year-olds since 1991. "The overwhelming common factor that...