It seems that at least once a week, in each, the front pages of The Greenwood Commonwealth and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger report killings. While the parties’ personal circumstances are not usually given, an educated assumption from the locations described, police reports, and witness and relatives’ statements is that the murderer and most times his victim are products of unstable economic and family environments.
In your fine piece last week about town hall meetings that focused on Jackson’s high murder rate you said that “’[n]o doubt the breakup of the nuclear family is a huge cause of this crime.” You are right, no doubt, and your analysis applies nationwide. Taking into account another huge cause, I believe there are two related reasons for the increase in crime: economic impoverishment and family impoverishment. One begets the other. The most areas most lawless are those most impoverished, with all of them suffering economic and familial neediness. In Jackson, the poverty rate is over 25% (U.S. Census Bureau “Quick Facts”” website) and the out-of-wedlock birthrate is around 80% (Miss. Dept. of Health, 2018 statistics). The figures are more alarming for populations in the Delta.
The analytical data shows that out-of-wedlock birth rates are related to crime and poverty rates. There is no father in the home; no adequate breadwinner, no protector, no paternal model for the children. National comparative studies show that a child born out of wedlock is 50% more likely to have problems educationally, nutritionally, socially, and/or psychologically.
As you noted, he is more likely to commit crime and go to jail than a child born into a two parent family. You don’t have “family” unless you have marriage. Yet, for all the social justice being preached over the past fifty years, it’s infrequent that one hears a politician or preacher carrying the message: “The importance of the family for the life and well-being of society entails a particular responsibility for society to support and strengthen marriage and the family.”
How many decades and generations have gone by since “the most religious state in the nation” has held in its pulpits anyone preaching against fornication, an act strictly forbidden in the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian religions? Given the atrocious statistics for Jackson, it looks like some preachers have been promoting it. The last mayoral candidate to call for married motherhood lost soundly.
Chip Williams is a Northsider.
