Crime, punishment, right and wrong: The real reasons behind the rising crime rate
Failure to teach right from wrong and excusing or rationalizing misbehavior has dire consequences. We must hold lawbreakers accountable and impose penalties for wrong-doing.
hen it comes to knowing right from wrong, never do wrong, but always do right the first time, because you may not have the chance to do right another time around. (Photo Illustration: Eve Banneker/America’s Conservative Voice) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
While President Biden and local officials keep talking about causes for the rise in crime in our major cities, proposing “solutions” that have failed in the past, like former President Bill Clinton’s Midnight Basketball idea, the real reason for its escalation is deeper than what we see on the surface.
The president’s proposals delivered in New York City last week are more window dressing. As with similar ideas in the past, Biden’s will do little to reduce crime. He talked about “gun violence” and hiring people to conduct “violence intervention” and predictably, more spending. His purpose seems aimed at duping the public into believing he’s serious about reducing violent crime, which has risen substantially on his watch.
It is not all, or even mainly, the president’s fault, though he contributes to the problem by his indifference to the massive lawbreaking at our southern border. Since the tumultuous ’60s, we have been reaping a moral whirlwind. For example, studies have shown that absent fathers contribute to undisciplined youth.
According to one study, when male youth do not have a father figure in their lives, they often join gangs to fill that emptiness and look to gang leaders to fill that “fatherless” void in their lives. There is a critical connection between a father’s absence, juvenile delinquency and anti-social aggression in our youth.
Most studies come to the conclusion that the likelihood a teenaged male will engage in criminal activity doubles when he is raised without a dad. In fact, 72 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without their father (Characteristics of Adolescents Charged with Homicide, 1987).
Furthermore, other studies show that school systems with above-average rates of father absence have nearly doubled the rates of school violence compared to those with below-average rates of father absence.
Children who do not live with both parents are also more likely to carry a gun, assault another student and assault a teacher. To put it mildly, father absence could be the single strongest predictor that a child will grow up to be violent or fall victim to violence (Father Absence and Youth Incarceration, 1999).
Moreover, fatherless children are twice as likely to drop out of school (National Fatherless Imitative, 2002).
Elections are not the only things that have consequences. So does a failure to teach right from wrong and excusing or rationalizing misbehavior, instead of holding lawbreakers accountable and imposing penalties.
The notion of wrongdoers getting their “just deserts” has also faded from our culture. Criminals are now regarded by too many progressives as victims of racism and social inequalities. This doesn’t explain why an overwhelming majority of those who live in poverty or are the product of diverse communities are law abiding.
Children are influenced by those around them. That is the natural order of things. Children who do not have an adult influence in their life to teach them right from wrong, encourage them to stay within the law, or just be a presence in their lives are more prone to criminal activity. An adult influence helps children make the right decision in all situations.
Failure to teach right from wrong and to effectively discipline children contributes to violations of moral and secular law. Schools today focus on buzzwords like “equity, equality and diversity” while ignoring the imposition of a shared moral code. Such a thing is becoming more difficult to find in our society every year. Those schools ― that lack of a shared moral code ― have contributed to the chaos that has made many streets and schools unsafe.
Children appear to be born with an inate sense of morality, what is right versus what is wrong. Primitive cultures, rarely exposed to civilization, exhibit this same proclivity, having moral laws that closely resemble those of Western culture. (Photo: Google Images) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There are three areas that encompass social behavior: the personal domain, the domain of social conventions, and the moral domain. The first area is subjective in that individuals have preferences for one thing over another where these is no objective standard of measurement. For example, there is nothing objectively better about liking sofas over armchairs. The second domain is arbitrary in that the rules could have been different and it wouldn't make any difference, such as driving on the left side of the road instead of the right.
In the third domain, however, behaviors are intrinsically right or wrong.
Children instinctively distinguish between these three domains. Children identify morality with those actions that have an intrinsic effect on the welfare of others. They understand that harming another as being wrong and acting fairly as being right. No one needs to tell them this is the case; they know it as a matter of course.
The inherent nature of morality (defined in this narrow sense) is underscored by the finding that children everywhere make these same distinctions and do so without rules telling that it is so. Nucci's conclusion is that morality is independent of social rules regarding proper behavior.
Drawing the difference between these two domains ― the moral and the conventional ― allows us to better understand the ways in which children comprehend the world and how they understand their own actions. At the same time, the distinction helps to reveal the underlying and universal nature of morality. Nucci's research indicates that concepts of human welfare, fairness, and rights are inherent, not socially conditioned or constructed. In both domains, some behaviors are deemed "right" and others "wrong."
Children distinguish between rules that are in the moral domain and those that are social conventions. They identify moral issues as those having to do with welfare and physical harm (pushing, shoving, hitting, killing), psychological harm (hurting others' feelings, ridiculing, name calling), fairness and rights (stealing, breaking promises, not sharing, destroying others' property), and positive behaviors (helping another in need, sharing, donating to a charity).
In justifying moral behavior, the criteria refer to the benefit or harm or the fairness or unfairness that the action would cause. For conventional issues, they turn to the norms and expectations of authority. What emerges from the work of cognitive psychologists is that, at young ages, children know the difference between social convention and morality, and they know it without being taught. You might say that they understand very well the point made by Socrates in his conversation with Euthyphro: Social conventions don't make for morality. It is morality that judges social conventions.
The reasons some people choose to act outside conventional realm are myriad, but they all can be classified in one of two categories.
There is the psychopath, a person who engages repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy for those victimized. These are the vast majority of those who are repeatedly involved in the criminal justice system. They number less that two percent of the population. For them, there is little hope of reform, rehabilitation or the ability to live a normal, productive life. Even if such a person is able to stop committing crimes, the characteristics of his life are that he will lie, display arrogance and will be unable to maintain a lasting close personal relationship.
Then there are those who have been deprived of any social norms throughout their lives. Fatherless, raised by a single mother, likely among brothers and sisters and stepbrothers and -sisters, being deprived of a decent education due to the poor quality of inner-city schools, they also have a propensity to become involved in a life of crime. Having no moral male influence in their lives, with few exceptions ― think Dr. Ben Carson ― they seek a “father figure” from among gang leaders, with disastrous results.
For these there is a reason to hope, even though their choices for male role models leave much to be desired. Despite the disadvantages of being raised by a single mother, they likely have positive influence from her, their grandmothers, perhaps even grandfathers. The lucky ones will avoid gang life. The unlucky ones will have to learn the hard way.
The problem is that, along the way, their lives of crime are going to be difficult to distinguish from those of the psychopaths’.
Police officers who are tasked with enforcing the law are now the targets of lawbreakers, regardless of which category those criminals fit into. At least 30 police and law enforcement officers were shot in the month of January ― up 67% from the same time last year, new statistics show, as the head of the country’s largest police union calls the violence against cops "the worst I have ever seen."
Five of the 30 officers shot in the line of duty were killed, and four of the shootings were "ambush-style attacks," the National Fraternal Order of Police said in a Tuesday press release. The union found that five officers were shot and three were killed by ambush attacks.
Police morale across the country morale has declined as a result of the large uptick in violence. They make arrests only to find that the criminals are put back on the streets to re-offend, thanks in part to lax laws, including so-called “bail reform” that often requires no bail at all for release, and progressive judges and district attorneys who seem determined to classify criminals as victims, not perpetrators.
People don’t automatically learn manners, they don’t acquire respect for the law, or value the lives and property of others. They must be taught and punished when they disobey, or some can be counted on to think there are no restraints for bad choices. Life is cheap, as more than 60 million legal abortions performed in the United States since 1973 testify. Some who feel cheated in life apparently believe the property of others rightly belongs to them.
All decisions about behavior begin in the heart. If we don’t train people to abide by standards that are best for themselves and the country, many will choose another path that leads them to gangs, drugs and a life of crime.
Few wish to stand for what is right in contemporary society because they fear condemnation from people and groups that will tag them with negative labels. If we don’t like the direction in which we are headed, it is time to yell “stop,” then turn around and take a different road. The one we are now on will lead to our destruction.
The late Bishop Fulton J. Sheen correctly forecast in the mid-20th century what was to come when he said: “The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.”
Crime is first a moral issue. Failure to address it on that level ensures it will only get worse.
Mike Nichols is an advocate of the counterrevolution with a four-step plan to defeat Leftist Fascism: We Organize. We Stand. We Resist. We Fight. He is a regular contributor to several conservative news websites and has a regular blog and Facebook presence at Americas Conservative Voice-Facebook.