What to do with the dregs? Another opinion

I've been more than a little preoccupied with the riots in the UK. [Do you think readers have noticed? Ed.] That's my excuse for having failed to say anything until today about similar riots closer to home, viz. Philadelphia USA. In the City of Brotherly Love, roving gangs of black teenagers have taken to beating up ordinary citizens on the streets. To stem the wave of terror, the mayor has imposed curfews and authorized harsher police measures.

Mayor Michael Nutter -- yes, that's his real name -- blames the mayhem on moral collapse. When he speaks of family breakdown and failed communities, Hizzoner runs no risk of being called a racist, for he is black himself, unlike Daniel Moynihan, author of The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, better known as The Moynihan Report.

The sociologist who later became a US senator asserted that the structure of family life in the black community constituted a "tangle of pathology...capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world," and that "at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time."

Moynihan adds: "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States".

That was in 1965, before some of the worst US race riots of the 20th century. In the nearly half-century since, things have actually gotten worse. Now we have -- in American as well as British cities -- packs of aimless, unschooled, almost feral youths, who loot, riot, rob, and beat people up just for fun.

Fact is, the problems of Britain’s inner cities are virtually the same as the problems of America’s inner cities. In both places, the disintegration of the family is intimately linked with social and moral decay. In the US, two-thirds of black kids are born to single mothers and unmarried couples. In parts of Britain the rate is already that high. Nationally 46 per cent of children are born to unmarried mothers, according to Britain’s Centre for Social Justice.

The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente -- one of Walt's favourite columnists -- cites those statistics in "Unskilled, unmarried, unwanted..." Ms Wente goes on to say, "Both Britain and America have developed a large, permanent underclass whose numbers are growing. Rootless, unmoored young men with no stake in society are a major threat to social order." [My emphasis. Walt.]

Sadly, but understandably, Ms Wente offers no solution. "The fix," she says, "isn’t nearly as obvious as the problem. It will require much more than insisting that parents set clearer boundaries for their children. More social programs aren’t the answer either. We’ve been there, done that, for the past four decades of the welfare state. If there’s one thing we should have learned, it’s that the state is totally unable to compensate for broken families."

Indeed. So what's left? As I argued in my previous post, if the carrot doesn't work, perhaps it's time to try the stick -- and a good stout one too. Ms Wente says that 19th-century society had different ways of dealing with the problem. "Many of these [miscreants] would go to war as cannon fodder. Some would go to sea, or be transported to Australia. The more ambitious ones would strike out for the new world.

"Today we need another way," she concludes, "But no one has a clue what it might be." Not so. Walt knows. See "Three sentences the rioters will understand". My ideas are old, but worth trying again. If anyone has better suggestions, let's hear them!