More Marriage Would Tackle Prison Overcrowding

News

As the Government prepares to release thousands of prisoners early due to overcrowding, a Times columnist has warned that the role of fatherlessness and family breakdown in driving the rise in serious crime is being ignored.

Writing in the newspaper last week, Melanie Phillips notes that the decline of marriage and the “rise and rise of cohabitation has long been an engine for mass fatherlessness”.

She cites a “mountain of evidence” that “fractured family life and the absence of committed fathers is a major factor behind boys getting involved in crime”.

“Married fathers teach their sons responsibility, self-control and, above all, self-respect,” she writes. “Yet in an age that has sacralised lifestyle choice, promoting the traditional married family is taboo.”

Phillips points to a Centre for Social Justice report, which states that, “the evidence of a series of UK longitudinal studies shows strong correlations between broken homes and delinquency. 70% of young offenders come from lone-parent families.”

She also cites a 2018 US study that reports: “Meta-analyses consistently find that children who are raised in homes in which at least one biological parent is absent face a higher prevalence of adolescent delinquency.”

Relying on another US study from 2021, she says fatherless children are three times more likely to be imprisoned than children raised in households with both parents.

And it’s not just children from poorer backgrounds that are affected, says Phillips. She highlights former Bedfordshire Assistant Chief Constable Jackie Sebire’s comments that some young people from more affluent backgrounds who lack the “protective factor” of a father figure look up to drug dealers and gangsters instead.

Fatherlessness is the “elephant in the room” when it comes to crime rates and prison overcrowding, says Phillips.

At C4M we couldn’t agree more. Too often social problems are addressed downstream from their true causes. Real marriage between one man and one woman for life is the glue that holds society together. Its collapse in recent decades has been a catastrophe for society, and children often pay the heaviest price. It’s time for politicians to stop ignoring the issue and return to approaches which protect and promote marriage.