Families & Crime

Other than those who attribute crime to social conditions—defining the criminal as part of the victim class—knowledgeable criminal justice practitioners understand that professional criminals often come from criminal families (also described as broken families) and this article from City Journal reminds us of that truth.

An excerpt.

“The Daley dynasty in Chicago may be giving way to the Obama-Emanuel political machine, but one thing remains constant in the Windy City: youth violence and a collective refusal to acknowledge its root cause. On the one-year anniversary of the beating death of a Chicago teen by his fellow students, Chicago remains in denial about the driving factor behind such mayhem: the disappearance of the black two-parent family.

“The September 24, 2009, mob assault on 16-year-old Derrion Albert was captured on cell-phone video and broadcast around the world, provoking a crisis in the Obama administration. The White House was at that moment pushing the International Olympic Committee to award the 2016 Games to Chicago, a city intimately associated with the president and his inner circle. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan hurriedly flew to the Windy City promising more federal aid, while the Chicago school system launched a $40-million social-services and security program to connect “at-risk” male students with social workers.

“Not surprisingly, the federal and local efforts have borne little fruit. Since Albert’s death, 78 more youth under the age of 19 have been killed in Chicago, overwhelmingly in black-on-black shootings. The studied silence in Chicago about the massive reality that underlies that city’s youth-violence epidemic—black family breakdown—is so complete as to border on perverse.”