I got some bad news for y’all: lots and lotsa white peepo be having kids and not gettin’ hitched neither. The just be engaged through the first 3-4 kids, Sometimes there are serial ‘engagements.’ Cause ain’t nobody can afford no weddings these days.
Seriously. I’m not even joking here. A lot of people delay marriage until they are done having kids and the kids are well into school so they don’t need WIC or SNAP benefits or govt. insurance coverage for the kids.
Weddings need not be expensive.
So if single parenthood causes criminal behavior, we’re all really going to hell in a hand basket. But it sure makes a lot more sense to keep on building prisons and jails than it does to provide excellent t health care, including birth control, sane maternity leave, mandatory parental leave fir both parents, living wages, fair housing, etc. .
I strongly suspect having two parents in the house that aren't married has an outcome more like married than single parent.
I don't entirely understand the not getting married part--we took a bus to the courthouse and then he went to take an exam and I went to work-- but for a significant number of people, getting married means losing financial benefits. If the mother earns less than (whatever the state cutoff is) and is unmarried, she can qualify for SNAP and WIC and help with childcare, perhaps rent subsidies.
Thinking only of my own observation, limited to this town of 25K, I can think of at least two people who were in class with my children and another who was in boy scouts with one of them who went to jail for serious crimes---murder, attempted murder. Another kid who got off on rape charges because of who his father is. And of course, I've mentioned kids who grew up to be well functioning, non-criminal adults despite having grown up in a household filled with addictions, including a two parent home. For my kids, going to public schools meant that they were in class with everyone from children of people who lived on public assistance to children of millionaires; children of doctors, lawyers, college professors, and of drug dealers, convicted rapists and child abusers. And in a particularly sad case, the kids were orphaned when their father killed their mother in front of police officers there to ensure she could remove belongings from the family home safely, and when the father subsequently hung himself in jail. There are more cases but this has really dragged on enough.
My observation is that kids who committed crimes but who had a 'nice' family with two parents, a middle class income or better tended to get off very lightly for their various offenses, including vehicular manslaughter, attempted murder, murder, and the aforementioned rape. And yes, it was rape because the circumstances stated in the trial proceedings fit the definition of rape (she was not only drunk but had also been drugged and was unconscious) but the jury decided to acquit him anyway. Local boy who was a sports star, father was a coach, blah blah blah. Everyone in those vignettes is white. In two of the cases, I know that the criminal was abused by at least one parent, rather savagely, and everyone--parents and children--remained in the family home.
As was mentioned above, criminal convictions tend to correlate with poverty. There is significant overlap between single parenthood and poverty, of course but none of the criminals in the above couple of paragraphs was raised in a single parent setting. Several, for certain, were raised in homes with significant histories of alcohol abuse. But not all of them. In my extended family is a person who was raised by both well educated parents in a stable, upper middle class home with excellent schools and lots of opportunities who was brought home by police multiple times after he crashed his car into a tree. This person is always employed, despite multiple stints in jail and prison as an adult. The siblings are hard working individuals with zero criminal history and no history of substance abuse. So is that person's son.
Poverty creates situations where the household is chronically stressed by financial woes, often untreated medical conditions, including mental health conditions, untreated substance dependency (often related to untreated mental health problems), housing and food insecurity. Poverty also removes the special privileges that come with having a middle or upper middle or upper class household with the financial resources at their command and the privilege of being thought to be capable of being rehabilitated by the loving financially stable family. If you or your family have money, you get breaks that you don't get without the money. Some breaks are explicit: family can pay for rehab, for example. Some are implicit, unconscious: Police, judges, jury see themselves in the family and feel more sympathy and more trust that the family will help ensure that the accused does not offend again.
All of that---every bit of that--is true if everyone involved is white and grew up in the town I live in. Because having family 'from here' for a few generations is also a privilege, usually, unless you come from a family with a history of criminal behavior and then, no breaks for you.
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