In a recent broadcast by National Public Radio on the plight of men locked up before trial and held for lack of sufficient funds to make bail, the commentator said that there are now more children impacted by their fathers being incarcerated than there are from divorce. I haven’t researched that rather shocking statistic, but as one who had an opportunity to experience such a thing on a first-hand basis for two and a half years over two decades ago, I have no doubt that it’s true.
According to www.divorcerate.org, present divorce rates in America run from nearly 50% for first marriages to as high as 73% for third marriages, so if NPR’s commentator is even close to being accurate, that’s a lot of children with no father present in their lives. Add them together, and it’s clear that America is a nation of “fatherless” children. Given this nation’s justice system’s obsessiveness with locking people up for nonviolent and drug related crimes, it’s no wonder that we can’t build prisons fast enough, or that we continue to have such exorbitant crime rates. We’ve got a burgeoning population of children with no place to go and no father to help them figure things out.
Before you think to yourself, “Well, what kind of fathers would a bunch of inmates and criminals make, anyway?” consider that the majority…not the minority…of inmates in America’s prisons today are not the heinous, scarred and tattooed gladiators one sees in the movies and television programs. A full 70% of those incarcerated are for nonviolent, first and second offenses…usually drug-related crimes. Even so, I’ve watched first-hand even the “gladiators” in visiting rooms, bouncing small children on their knees, and being warm, kind and loving with them…and returning to their cell blocks fighting back the tears everyone knows are flooding their eyes.
The damage, sociologically, to this country in locking men (and women) up for interminable periods for crimes of a relatively harmless nature is far-reaching, and much more destructive in the long run than all the crimes put together that create such a rip in the fabric of our society. We’re breeding generation after generation of young criminals, at a rate that far exceeds that of radical Islamic terrorists who cultivate and train their young children to become suicide bombers…and we’re oblivious to how and why crime is so rampant in our streets.
I’m not suggesting that we do not punish law-breakers, by any means. I’m saying that we must have legislative reform in this critically important aspect of our development. We cannot continue to justify such extremes in retaliating against people who break the law, and expect that just because we remove them from our streets that we are going to be safer. There is a delusion in so thinking, because the more we do that, the more we ignore the children who are left to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile world facing economic and political upheaval.
If we don’t take steps NOW to change the laws, and redirect those many individuals who can be trained to function more responsibly while performing community services instead of wasting away behind bars and Plexiglas cellblocks, we will soon find ourselves like I did once…facing the wrong end of a loaded gun while my car and pockets, and bank account were emptied. Thank God that at least one of those young perpetrators wasn’t quite yet so strung out on Meth that the chamber of that gun he held wasn’t emptied on me.
Don Kirchner
Sedona, Arizona
