Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  There is no longer any doubt that communities with many single parents, whether because of divorce or out-of-wedlock births, display much higher rates of crime, drug use, school dropouts, voluntary unemployment, etc. Nor is there any doubt that the absence of a father is damaging not only to the unwed mother but to the prospects of the children.

  [T]he presence of a decent father helps a male child learn to control aggression; his absence impedes it…. When the mother in a mother-only family is also a teenager, or at least a teenager living in urban America, the consequences for the child are even grimmer. The most authoritative survey of what we know about the offspring of adolescent mothers concluded that the children suffer increasingly serious cognitive deficits and display a greater degree of hyperactivity, hostility, and poorly controlled aggression than is true of children born to older mothers of the same race, and this is especially true of the boys.2

  Add to this the fact that these boys, who have a great deal of time free of oversight, are heavy consumers of the images of violence and sex in television, movies, and rap music, live in neighborhoods where violence and sexual predation are regarded as signs of manhood, and gangs fill the void created by a fathers absence. The wonder is that any of these youths avoid underclass behavior. The correlation of illegitimate births and crime has been well documented. The birth rate for unmarried women aged 15 to 19 increased threefold between 1960 and 1992, while the percentage of all babies born to unmarried teenagers went from 15 to 70 percent.3 It is not surprising then that between 1985 and 1993, murders committed by 18- to 24-year-olds increased by 65 percent, and those committed by 14- to 17-year-olds increased by a staggering 165 percent.4

  For a long time many people were under the misimpression that divorce does not have effects on children comparable to the effects of illegitimacy. According to this view, children were better off if the divorce was managed well than they would have been if they continued living with parents who had ceased to love one another. We now know better. “Poverty is one of the most easily measured effects of unmarriage as well as one of the most predictable. But it is not necessarily the most destructive to mother, child, or the nation. The evidence is now overwhelming that the collapse of marriage is creating a whole generation of children less happy, less physically and mentally healthy, less equipped to deal with life or produce at work, and more dangerous to themselves and others“5 The adverse effects of divorce on children and society may not be as devastating as the teenage pregnancies of inner-city welfare mothers, but they are significant nonetheless.

  White Americans tend to think of these problems as pretty much confined to the black underclass of the inner cities, but that is not the case, or it will not be the case for long. Charles Murray, a political scientist, and others point out that black trendlines—of crime, dropout from the labor force, and illegitimacy—all moved sharply upward when the black illegitimacy rate passed 25 percent, which suggests that the tipping point is somewhere around that number. Black illegitimacy now stands at 68 percent of births.

  By 1991, however, 22 percent of white births were illegitimate and, Murray notes, the figures get much worse when viewed in terms of economic class.6 For white women below the poverty line in the year prior to giving birth, 44 percent of births were illegitimate, while only 6 percent have been illegitimate for women above the poverty line. This is primarily a lower-class phenomenon, though increasingly women with good educations and income choose to have a child without having a husband. If the tipping point theory is correct, the white lower class is on the verge of becoming an underclass.

  Just as the link between illegitimacy and crime is well known, so the association of illegitimacy with the welfare system is increasingly recognized. At a time when the institution of marriage is under attack in the popular culture and in government policy, it is madness to offer an apartment of her own and a steady income to an unmarried young woman or girl if she will only have a baby while remaining unmarried. As she has additional children, her income rises. The availability of welfare relieves the father of any responsibility that perhaps he might have felt.

  No one supposes that the relationship between welfare and illegitimacy is unaffected by non-economic factors. James Q. Wilson points out that increases in illegitimate births were strongly correlated with increases in welfare from the early 1960s to about 1980. At that point, however, the value of the welfare package in real dollars flattened out for almost a decade, but the illegitimacy rate continued to rise. (This could be, in part, because the provision of welfare for illegitimacy up to 1980 had drastically weakened the social stigma previously attached to this behavior so that illegitimacy continued to rise even though the economic benefits did not.) There are, moreover, great differences in illegitimacy rates across ethnic groups facing similar circumstances. Mexican-American children, for example, are much more likely to grow up in two-parent families than are black children, and are one-fifth as likely to be on welfare, even though poor. Black illegitimacy is rather low in states such as Idaho, Montana, Maine, and New-Hampshire, even though they have rather generous welfare payments, and the rate is quite high in many parts of the Deep South, even though these states have rather low welfare payments.

  It is also possible that other factors are pressing toward earlier and more frequent sexual activity, so that even a thorough-going welfare reform, while it would help, would probably not return illegitimacy rates to pre-1960 levels. The attitudes of sexual liberation continue to influence teenage behavior through television, films, popular music, and magazine advertisements. Those attitudes are made all the more potent because boys and girls mature sexually at much earlier ages than they once did. Thus, there is a much longer period of intense sexual desire before marriage would be emotionally or financially appropriate.

  Sex education in the schools appears to operate more as an incitement to sexual activity than as a heeded caution. Chelmsford (Massachusetts) High School employed Suzanne Landolphi of Hot, Sexy and Safer Productions to give two performances for students in the ninth through twelfth grades in which she gave sexually explicit monologues and discussed penis and breast size and advocated oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual activity among minors. Parents were not told in advance and students were not permitted to opt out. Some parents and students sued, so far without success. Stories like this abound, but even when the advocacy is less open, the message that the students are expected to engage in sex is always there. Opportunites for teenagers to engage in sex are also more frequent than previously: much of it takes place in homes that are now empty because the mothers are working. The modern liberal devotion to sex education is an ideological commitment rather than a policy of prudence. But even if we could abolish that counterproductive policy, the other factors remain as stubborn facts.

  Whatever our dilemmas in these respects, it is clear that the welfare system makes matters far worse than they need to be. This is not a recent insight. I was startled to discover that the point was made in a 1971 article by Irving Kristol,7 and even more startled to learn from that article that Alexis de Tocqueville made the same point in his Essay on Pauperism in 1835. We appear to be slow learners.

  An obvious line of attack, then, is the drastic restructuring of welfare. That will be difficult for several reasons. For one, there is a major constituency opposed to any change—any change, that is, other than an increase in welfare benefits. This constituency is made up not just of welfare recipients; its most vociferous component is modern liberals of the welfare-is-a-right-not-a-privilege persuasion. The left wing of the Democratic Party finds it profitable to resist any welfare reform on the stated ground that they are protecting poor children from Republican rapacity that would have those children sleeping on the grates.

  Political disingenuousness aside, even those who realize that reform is imperative are far from agreement on what it should look like or how best to accomplish it. A Brookings Institution Occasional Paper shows the range and complexity of the issues to be
studied: entitlements versus block grants; family caps on benefits; teenage mother exclusions; work requirements, work support, and participation requirements. About some of these questions social science apparently provides varying degrees of guidance, so that much remains in doubt. Unfortunately, debates over welfare frequently seem less informed by research than by ideology.8 For the moment, all one can unhesitatingly recommend is experimentation, and experimentation means allowing states greater freedom to innovate. The one certainty is that federal control is not working. Reform at the federal level would produce a single solution for the entire nation, which would almost certainly be the wrong solution. A diversity of programs would not only respond to very different local conditions but would constitute experiments that could, if successful, be adopted by other states or localities, and if failures, be avoided by them. When the best social scientists admit to uncertainty about what will work, decentralization is the rational course. There is no guarantee that a workable solution, if there is one, may not prove more expensive, perhaps much more expensive, than existing welfare programs. But the object is not to save money—existing welfare programs are not that expensive. The object is to save children, and thereby save a civilization.

  What should the states do? Charles Murray makes a strong case for adopting a policy that no welfare will be given to support an illegitimate child conceived after the policy has been announced. A welfare mother with illegitimate children would realize that having more would lower her and their standard of living. A young woman or teenager would understand that having a first child out of wedlock would not give her an apartment at public expense or a welfare check. Presumably, these realizations would operate as strong deterrents. It might also, Murray thinks, involve her family in the girl’s support, thus encouraging the family to teach and monitor better behavior. John Dilulio, a political scientist at Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, doubts, however, that ending welfare would bring the unwed mothers family back into the picture in enough cases. Many of those families, even if they consist of more than an unwed mother of the unwed mother, are so dysfunctional that the children would most likely experience terrible squalor and malnutrition.

  Murray recognizes these problems, of course. That is why he, Dilulio, and Wilson favor a strategy of altering the inner-city ethos by means of private redemptive movements, supported by a system of shelters or group homes in which at-risk children and their young mothers can be given familial care and adult supervision in safe and drug-free settings. Living there would be a condition of receiving public assistance. Boarding schools might be provided for children of mothers who, because of drug addiction or for other reasons, cannot cope. No one knows if this would work, if large programs can do what some small programs have accomplished, or if even the best programs, whose successes pre-dated the arrival of crack cocaine, can salvage people from that drug.

  Myron Magnet suggests that welfare payments not be raised to mothers who have a second welfare child, and that out-of-wearock pregnancies be made much less attractive by refusing to set up unmarried mothers in their own apartments. Instead, they would have to live in group shelters with rules of behavior and work requirements. Resident single mothers would have to attend daily workshops on child care and rearing. Many welfare single mothers are abysmally ignorant of such matters. Pre-school children would be in the shelters day care center during working hours, where a program like Head Start would give them values and knowledge that underclass children do not adequately acquire. If welfare mothers chose not to participate and failed to support their children, the state will take the children away as it does now.9 A further question needs to be answered, however. After the child is taken away, what is to be done about the mother, now presumably without support and also likely to produce more children? Giving her welfare to keep her alive would put us right back in the old system; not keeping her alive or letting her sink into utter misery is unthinkable.

  For those who distrust the states’ response to the welfare problem, there is already a record of how the states behave when they are freed of federal control through a waiver process that has been in place since 1992. Douglas Besharov, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, summarizes the most common features of the various state programs.10 These are: requiring recipients to look for work, which reduces welfare caseloads; allowing recipients to keep more of their earnings (the common policy of reducing welfare by one dollar for every dollar earned provides a strong disincentive to work); making it easier for married couples to receive benefits instead of penalizing two-parent families and so providing a disincentive to stable relationships; requiring welfare mothers to take better care of their children by, for example, reducing welfare payments when parents do not send their children to school.

  No one can be sure what will and will not work. In fact, no one should be sure that anything will work. Our policies have produced a large class of people, mostly female, who are dependent on welfare and whose lives, perhaps, cannot now be greatly-altered. Proposals to train single mothers for jobs or to require them to take additional schooling have great public appeal, but such programs may produce only meager results. The children will have to be cared for while the mothers are occupied, which probably means an enormous expansion of day care centers. But the main drawback is that these are mostly young women of substandard intelligence, self-discipline, and motivation; otherwise they would not be in the predicament they are. They will not be easy to train and are unlikely to make good employees. Had welfare not seduced them into the lives they lead, they probably would have entered the job market much earlier in life and by now would have learned the habits and attitudes that employers require.

  We may have to accept the fact that welfare has produced more than one lost generation. There is probably nothing society or government can do for existing welfare-dependent unwed mothers except keep them on some form of welfare. The question for public policy is what to do about their children and about women who have not yet become single mothers but are very likely to do so. The urgent problem is keeping future generations out of the welfare-illegitimacy-drugs-crime trap.

  Fortunately, approaches are being tried that hold promise. For the most part, such approaches involve bringing a stable relationship with an adult into a child’s life. Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), a not-for-profit corporation, reported on the effects of mentoring programs at the local affiliates of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of America (BB/BS).11 BB/BS maintains 75,000 matches between an adult and a youngster. Over an eighteen-month period, P/PV studied 959 10- to 16-year-olds who applied to BB/BS programs, assigning half to a treatment group for which matches with adult volunteers were made or attempted and assigning the other half to a waiting list as a control group. The results showed dramatic differences between the two groups in initiating drug and alcohol use, physical violence, skipping school, the quality of relationships with parents and peers. In all these categories, the treatment group showed superior results. Little Brothers and Little Sisters, for example, were 46 percent less likely than those in the control group to start using drugs. These improvements occurred although the contact between the adult and the child typically consisted of three meetings a month for four hours per meeting.

  It is an open question whether programs like BB/BS can be greatly expanded. There is, for instance, the question of whether an adequate supply of suitable adult volunteers can be recruited and whether the cost (about $1000 per match) can be met. P/PV expresses doubt about funding a greatly expanded program entirely with private funds but does not seem adequately aware of the perils of accepting public funding. If the government decided to help, it is entirely predictable that costs and bureaucratic interference would rise and effectiveness would decline.

  An additional promising approach, already underway in a few cities, is the mobilization of black churches to carry out youth and community development plans. John Dilulio has announced that he has decided to give over most of the rest of his pr
ofessional life to working with a coalition of inner-city black Christian clergy to accomplish such a mobilization. He thinks that empowering these ministers is a key to resolving the nation’s violent crime problem. That empowerment should be accomplished not with government programs and funds but with “voluntary efforts, with private contributions, and with our respect and prayers.“12

  The benefits of successful welfare reform will be long-term, but we face an urgent short-term problem. Even if we assume that welfare can be reformed and rates of illegitimacy brought down to levels that do not threaten the stability of the social order, the extremely unpleasant fact remains that, for some years ahead, we are in for high, and probably ever increasing, levels of violent crime. The immediate question is how we can protect ourselves. The dimensions of the crime problem are clearly set out in a report, “The State of Violent Crime in America,“13 in Ben Wattenberg’s book Values Matter Most,14 and in Dilulio’s Bradley Lecture “Violent Crime and Representative Government” at the American Enterprise Institute. Most of the factual material that follows is drawn from those sources.

  One reason crime has increased is that the likelihood and severity of punishment has drastically declined. The United States has adopted a system of revolving-door justice for adults and juveniles alike. A distinctive feature of modern liberalism is its unwillingness to deal with crime with the rigor it deserves and that the general public wants. Paul Johnson argues that this unwillingness calls into question our claim to be a working democracy: “In both Britain and the U.S., a permanent working alliance exists between, on the one hand, liberals in academia and the media, and, on the other, their counterparts in government and its agencies, in private and trade union lobbies, in the courts and in law firms.“15 This alliance opposes severe punishments and opposes, most especially, capital punishment. Stanley Rothman and his colleagues have found that those I have been calling modern liberals see groups, such as criminals, that stand outside society’s moral consensus as not constituting a serious threat.16 The public wants much harder treatment of violent criminals than liberals are willing to give them, in legislation, in court trials and sentencing, and in parole and probation procedures. Our system immediately puts back on the streets 63 percent of all pretrial violent felony defendants, fails to incarcerate 47 percent of those convicted of violent crimes, and releases those convicted of violence and sent to prison before they have served even half their time.