High rates of crime, single-parent homes largely overlap, data confirms.
As Just the News recently reported, the U.S. is now home to 11 of the top 50 most dangerous cities in the world. All 11, as the piece noted, are governed by Democratic mayors. All 11 also have Democratic district attorneys.
Permissive criminal justice policies are widely thought to be large factors driving such grim statistics. Dig a little deeper, however, and an even more important cause of the crime epidemic plaguing blue cities comes into sharp focus: Many of these cities are also home to a staggering percentage of single-parent households, the great majority of which are headed by single mothers.
This large overlap shouldn’t be surprising for two reasons. First, the U.S. has the highest rate of single-parent households in the world. Second, the connection between single-parent households and crime is very strong. According to research carried out by Jerrod Brown, a behavioral specialist at Concordia St. Paul, the extant literature “suggests that children raised in single-parent households experience more physical and psychological problems compared to those raised in two-parent households.” Moreover, he added, the “implications of homes in which fathers are absent may be important to explore for criminal justice and mental health professionals.”
There are roughly 74 million children in the U.S. Close to 24 million, or 34%, of these children live in a single-parent family. Of these, 15 million live in mother-only households.
As Jack Brewer noted in a report last year for the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a public policy think tank founded by Trump administration alumni, 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions and 85% of youth in prisons now come from fatherless homes. Fatherless children, according to the report, “are six times more likely to live in poverty and commit criminal acts than children raised in dual-parent households.”