Chris Powell: Why not just take him to Rikers now?
Rikers Island from above.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
If distributing more money was the solution to the state's serious social problems, Connecticut would have solved them long ago. Instead state government now has another commission, the Commission on Community Gun Violence Intervention and Prevention, which met for the first time last month and is to advise the state Public Health Department about awarding another $2.9 million in grants to "community-based violence-intervention organizations."
Despite last month's announcement from Gov. Ned Lamont's re-election campaign that Connecticut is headed toward "four more years of gun safety," the daily shootings continue, especially in the cities. Except for the political patronage to be conferred by those grants, no one really needs "community-based violence-intervention organizations" to figure out why.
For starters, most children in the cities have little if any parenting. More than 80 percent are living without a father in their home, many having no contact with their fathers at all. Many of their mothers are badly stressed by single parenting and trying to make a living, even with welfare benefits. Some have drug problems. Some are so addled that their children are being raised by a grandparent.
Their parents having failed them, many children then fail in school, if they even reach school. The chronic absenteeism rate in Hartford's school system is 44 percent, in New Haven's 58 percent. It is high in some suburbs too. While most children in Connecticut graduate from high school without ever mastering basic math and English, the failure to meet grade-level proficiency in city schools is catastrophic at all levels.
As a result many young people -- most young people in the cities -- enter adult life without the education and job skills necessary to get out of poverty, demoralized, resentful, angry, often unhealthy mentally as well as physically, lacking respect for society and indifferent to decent behavior. These circumstances prove disastrous when they collide with the natural male aggressiveness that has never been tamed by parenting.
Many quickly get in trouble with the law, and repeatedly, and so become still more alienated, not ever understanding what hit them and why, since, after all, the underclass lifestyle has been normalized. Guns are everywhere -- and always will be, no matter what laws are enacted -- and so will always present what seem like opportunities for advancement or settling scores.
"Community-based violence-intervention organizations" and their advocates think that, most of all, these troubled young men need a good talking to, and indeed such counseling can help temporarily in critical situations. But other critical situations soon develop unless someone can escape the underclass culture.
As with so much else wrong with society, government chooses to address only the symptoms, not the causes. Especially with social problems, when government encounters the equivalent of broken pipes flooding a road or basement, it doesn't try to repair the pipes but instead calls for more buckets for bailing. The bucket manufacturers make a fortune but the problem is never solved, since mere remediation quickly becomes too profitable financially and politically.
Government refuses to learn from this though it's an old story. Many years ago an episode of the television drama Law and Order showed police detectives entering a dark and dingy city apartment where an abandoned baby was crying. A veteran detective who had seen it all remarked: "How about if I just take him to Rikers now?" {Rikers Island is New York City’s main prison complex.}
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PARENTAL BILL OF RIGHTS: While the formal text of the "parental bill of rights" proposed by the Republican candidates for Connecticut governor and lieutenant governor, Bob Stefanowski and Laura Devlin, which was cited in this column last week, does not say so explicitly, Stefanowski elaborates that its provision on school choice means to make church schools eligible for state-financed student vouchers.
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SOCIAL SECURITY TAX: Supporting U.S. Rep. John B. Larson's legislation to strengthen the Social Security system, this column last week misstated the annual personal income level at which the Social Security tax is lifted. It is $147,000, not $400,000. To improve the system's financing, Larson's legislation would impose a special 2 percent tax on incomes above $400,000.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Connecticut. He can be reached at CPowell@JournalInquirer.com.