Apart from education, the principle social spending program for young males in the United States today is prison construction. The social science evidence clearly suggests that the absence of a father is a much more important and more accurate predictor of a young male getting into trouble with the juvenile justice system, and ultimately ending up in a prison cell, than any of the other factors, such as educational attainment of the mother, family income, race, religion, quality of the neighborhood, and so on. Consequently, a society that has fewer and fewer boys growing up with fathers will be a society that has more and more prison cells, since that society will be generating male violence faster than it can incarcerate. Moreover, we are also witnessing a rise in domestic violence and other forms of male violence against women. Reports suggest that the incidence of these crimes is increasing steadily.
Married fatherhood is a socializing role for men.
The continuing decline in the number of men in our society who fill this role, and their replacement in so many homes by unrelated males, is clearly driving up the rate of male violence against women and children. A society such as ours that no longer cares whether or not males nurture their offspring, or at least no longer enforces any expectations of paternal nurture, will be a society in which child well-being declines and male violence rises. This is the current trend in our society. Clearly, over the last twenty years, the dimensions and consequences of contemporary family change have been the subject of intense national debate. This debate has often been incoherent and even silly, and still more often, highly partisan and politically divisive.