Youth And Crime

16 Pages 3910 Words

omes - 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. 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."(Ethnic News Watch, 2002) 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 can be isolated in determining whether young...