My wife and I were at one of Hollywood PR guru Michael Levine’s dinner parties the other might and had an interesting conversation with Dennis Zine, a Los Angeles City Councilman. One of my former employees is one of Zine’s key people, so I’ve followed his career some. He’s an interesting guy, and something of a maverick.
Anyway, at the dinner he was talking about Los Angeles’ gang problem and how to deal with it. I put forward the notion that the key issue with gangs is fatherlessness. Zine was caught a little off-guard. I mean, I’m sure he’s aware of the linkage between fatherlessness and troubled youth but, like many politicians, he’s saddled with so many immediate problems and having to put out fires that there’s often insufficient time for long-term solutions.
I inflicted my co-authored newspaper column on fatherlessness and gangs on Dennis and he said he’d read it. I don’t think reducing fatherlessness has to be that much of a long-term solution–there are things California could do in the short term. Two good places to start would be:
1) helping fathers, including low-income, unwed fathers, get meaningful joint custody
2) reining in the child support system which victimizes low-income minority dads
The column is below. I also recommend my blog post ‘The first thing one notices about the gang world is this: There are no fathers’, which is about Sudhir Venkatesh’s research on gangs.
CA Anti-Gang Bills Miss Central Truth About Kids & Gangs
By Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks
Gangs were responsible for 70% of the shootings last year in Los Angeles, and local lawmakers are proposing numerous measures to address the gang crisis. One package of bills, recently endorsed by Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Sheriff Lee Baca, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, would make it more difficult for gang members to get firearms. Another, introduced by Compton Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, would create Gang Alternative Education Programs in selected inner-city areas.
While these measures have merit, one central truth is being ignored—the presence of fathers, including nonresident fathers, greatly reduces the likelihood that a teen will become involved in crime or gangs.
A study just released by Boston College finds that when nonresident fathers are involved in their adolescent children’s lives, the incidence of violence, crime, substance abuse and truancy decrease markedly. Most of the families in the study, which was published in the journal Child Development, are low-income African-American and Hispanic families. The study’s lead author, professor Rebekah Levine Coley, explains:
“Nonresident fathers in low-income, minority families appear to be an important protective factor for adolescents…Greater involvement from fathers may help adolescents develop self-control and self-competence, and may decrease the opportunities adolescents have to engage in problem behaviors.”
The study also found that when teens begin to slide towards delinquency, nonresident fathers increase their involvement in response. The researchers found such involvement to be effective–the impact of father involvement was the greatest on the kids who had previously been the most troubled.
The new study’s findings are consistent with a wealth of research on the impact of fathers. One study published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency concluded that fatherlessness is so predictive of juvenile crime that, as long as there was a father in the home, children of poor and well-to-do families had similar juvenile crime rates. A University of Chicago study of crime in the African-American areas of 171 cities found that fatherlessness was the strongest predictor of violent juvenile crime.
The link between fatherlessness and crime has long been axiomatic for law enforcement officials. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox says he’s examined hundreds of pre-sentencing reports detailing the family histories of convicted criminals, and found one common denominator:
“Uniformly, there was a parent, usually the father, missing from the home.”
The devastating impact of fatherlessness is clearly understood behind prison walls. (more…)
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