The Left, Family, Culture

[Snowden]

THE LEFT

“If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue—the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama... Last July, Obama said ‘more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.’ Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, ‘We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives.’ But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute... notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population... Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: ‘We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from.’ Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men. But Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses... James Q. Wilson, America’s premier social scientist, notes that ‘the typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses)’ and Wilson says that 10 years of scholarly studies ‘have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways—poverty, urbanization, and the proportion of young men in the population—that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.’ It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.” —George Will


FAMILY

“Barack Obama’s recent call for responsible fatherhood is welcome, overdue—and misleadingly incomplete... In Obama’s words: ‘We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled—doubled—since we were children. We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.’ Obama is right on all of the above, but the stats are even worse. More than 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. Since 1960, we’ve tripled the number of American children living in fatherless homes, from 8 million to 24 million. The population as a whole increased just 1.7 times during that period. What Obama fails to mention is that the problem of absent fathers, especially in the black community, is tied in part to well-intentioned social programs such as those the presumptive Democratic nominee intends to expand—domestic violence prevention and child support collections... Changing the system won’t be easy, but Obama is uniquely positioned to make a difference in the conversation. He should begin by saying that bringing fathers back into the family means ending the demonization of men and the culture’s trivialization of fatherhood. That would be a change we could believe in.” —Kathleen Parker


CULTURE

“With a few exceptions... when youth get involved in politics in large numbers, it is not a good thing... Having been a young person [in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s] and having watched as my university (Columbia) had its classrooms taken over and teaching interrupted by fellow students; having watched the sexualization of society that followed the ‘Make Love Not War’ generation; having watched America become obsessed with youth rather than wisdom as a result of the ‘Never Trust Anyone Over 30’ mantra of the ‘60s young people; having seen the myriad speech codes that arose, ironically, out of the ‘Free Speech’ movement at Berkeley and elsewhere; having watched pacifist-like doctrines decimate America’s moral compass; having witnessed a selfish preoccupation with an ever increasing number of inherent ‘rights,’ with a commensurate devaluing of inherent moral obligations, I, among many others, am not enamored of the ‘60s and ‘70s youth movement... [and] am not encouraged by the ecstatic reaction of young people to Barack Obama. The track record of politically excited youth movements in modern Western history is not a good one. And I see no reason why this will prove to be the first major exception.” —Dennis Prager


http://patriotpost.us:80/

[Woodmonkey]

Obama’s words: ‘We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled—doubled—since we were children.

It's good that he said it. More and more responsible, influential Blacks need to speak out.