I believe that vick has paid his dues.

There is an editorial in our local paper about the fact that sentencing a juvenile to life with no parole is the same as a death sentence, which you can't sentence a juvenile to death. It's going to bring up an interesting debate over the next couple years.

Thumper; you're tough on people! Banned for life!

Jerry;
I have no idea what to do. (I'd say pray, but Mick will jump all over that....!)

Last night, I met some people I worked with 10 years ago. One woman who worked for me, her son was just sentenced to 14 years. She didn't go into specifics. He'll be 33 when he gets out. What's he going to do then? She said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. True? I don't know. She is divorced and raised two kids mostly by herself. Went to night school, got business degree and is close to finishing her Masters. Would having a decent father around all those years changed things for that kid in a way having only a mother around could not? Yes, I think more than anything else, two parents are the single biggest benefit to a child's success. That's not exactly man bites dog news however.........

From a book I read:

"Of all single mothers in America, only 6.5 percent of them are widows, 37.8 percent are divorced, and 41.3 percent gave birth out of wedlock. The 6.5 percent of single mothers whose husbands have died shouldn't be called 'single mothers' at all. We already have a word for them: 'widows.' Their children do just fine compared with the children of married parents." -- P.35


"Here is the lottery ticket that single mothers are handing their innocent children by choosing to raise them without fathers: Controlling for socioeconomic status, race, and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent. By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers. Seventy-two percent of juvenile murderers and 60 percent of rapists come from single-mother homes. Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced. A 1990 study by the Progressive Policy Institute showed that after controlling for single motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates disappeared.

Various studies have come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim. According to the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, children from single-parent families account for 63 percent of all youth suicides, 70 percent of all teenage pregnancies, 71 percent of all adolescent chemical/substance abuse, 80 percent of all prison inmates, and 90 percent of all homeless and runaway children.

A study cited in the Village Voice produced similar numbers. It found that children brought up in single-mother homes 'are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.' Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts.

....Many of these studies, for example, are from the 1990s, when the percentage of teenagers raised by single parents was lower than it is today. In 1990, 28 percent of children under eighteen were being raised in one-parent homes (mother or father), and 71 percent were being raised in two-parent homes. By 2005, more than one-third of all babies born in the United States were illegitimate. That's a lot of social problems coming.

...Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, 70 percent fewer teenage births, 63 to 70 percent fewer teenage suicides, and 70 percent to 90 percent fewer runaways and you will appreciate what the sainted single mothers have accomplished." -- P.37-38

Heard on the news the other day, teenage preg's are down.

Ver; i heard that too, but didn't read the whole article.
is it the sheer number that's down or the %?

WM -

When I was in college in the 1960s, I had one sociology course in which we discussed the high rate of single parenting among the black community.

Of course, this was only 100 years after the end of slavery, so say what, maybe 3 or 4 generations?

The author of one of the texts we used in the course theorized that the high single mother % of black women had been caused by the practice in the days of slavery of selling women with children, while at the same time selling male slaves apart from their wives and kids.  Much like the breeders of livestock still do today with horses - selling mares with a foal at side.

This sounded reasonable at the time - during the slave days, black families' ties to each other in the south were very tenuous at best, with the males always being sold more often to buyers who took them away.

Hence, this author's premise was that black folks simply got used to single motherhood as a normal way of life.

Could be true, but I don't put much credence in the theory, especially today, 135 years after the end of slavery, and at least another generation of two has come and gone since the book was written.

But of course we also know stellar black families who are as, if not more, devoted to each other than anyone else - so I don't think you can lump a class of people all together like this author did.

Rather than accepting this author's theory, I think it has far more to do with economics and the higher poverty rate in the black community.