Project Logic Ga

The Sunday Albany Herald had an outstanding article about the root causes of crime.  To be honest, crime starts with the family foundation. When that mad man shot police in Houston last year, the Black police chief said the police are the scapegoats for bad families, underperforming schools and everything else wrong in America.

Before I share the hottest points from the article, I want to put my two cents worth in the mix.  A woman alone rarely successfully raises a strong man.  I couldn’t bring a girl up properly without help from ladies in my family, church and community.  Black churches need to be packed and teaching churches like the A.M.E. church shouldn’t be dying.  The residual benefit of church attendance for young family should be fellowship with successful and encouraging members of the community…folks eager to share their keys to positive living as well as connections.  Kids need to learn how to sit up straight and pay attention in class and that starts in church.

The federal and state government has unintentionally destroyed the Black family with too much assistance.  Kids plan to have kids like this: You have a baby with any oh body and you go get a check. Huh?

Then, you have babymakers, I refuse to call them fathers, who are too cool to flip burgers or pick fruit but not too cool to have others feed their “seed.”

Albany Herald    Sunday, November 26, 2007

Officials: Crime may be symptom of family issues             by Jon Gosa

Poverty is the mother of crime.

With statistics showing 33.8 percent of Albany’s population living at or below the poverty level, lack of material success seems to be a powerful argument for the city’s escalating violent crime.

“I want to know why these kids are out at 2 or 3 a.m., shooting each other.” City Commissioner Jon Howard said.  “Where are their parents? I don’t know how you do it, but we have to address the family.  I have a slogan: ‘If you can’t feed ‘em, don’t breed ‘em.’

71 percent of babies born in Albany were born to unwed mothers.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study by Patrick Fagan “The Real root Causes of Violent Crime: the Breakdown of Marriage, Family and Community” the rise in violent crime over the past 30 years parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers.

Data show that the type of aggression and hostility demonstrated by a future criminal often is foreshowed in unusual aggressiveness as early as age 5 or 6.

Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, more than 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents.

Many lawmakers in Congress and in the states assume that the high level of crime in America must have its roots in material conditions, such as poor employment opportunities and a shortage of adequately funded social programs.  But, members of Congress and other policymakers cannot understand the root causes of crime if they insist on viewing in purely in material terms. The view blinds policymakers to the personal aspects of crime, including moral failure, the refusal to exercise personal responsibility and the inability or refusal to enter into family and community relationships based on love, respect and attachment both to the broader community and to a common code of conduct.

Government policy has, evidence indicates, become a powerful facilitator of the long-term rise of crime.