An article in USA Today features the three Caston brothers of Louisiana, each serving time in Angola State Penitentiary. Their dad named the boys after his legendary heroes, the notorious Frank and Jesse James.
USA Today uses the story to launch into a detailing of "what social scientists and law enforcement officials see as an increasingly complex and persistent problem: people who become criminals in part because of the influence of family members.
Social scientists and law enforcement authorities say the influence of family members may be one of the most important and largely unaddressed factors in determining whether people adopt lives of crime.
Nearly half of the 2 million inmates in state prisons across the USA - 48% - say they have relatives who also have been incarcerated, according to a Justice Department report in 2004, the most recent comprehensive survey of state prison populations.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conservatively estimates that there are two million children who have one or both parents incarcerated. The article cites Oregon psychologist Mark Eddy, who is tracking 400 inmates and their family ties in an attempt to determine how far reaching the problem is. He has some sense of it already.
At least 20% of the inmates reported that their mothers had been in prison. At least half said their fathers or siblings had been in prison.
Consider also that a majority of crimes in most areas are perpetrated by a very small number of persons. With an apparent intergenerational propensity toward crime, these parental influence are having a profound impact across the U.S.
And it's not just the bad influence of a parent, but the lack of influence as well. I used to work with a ministry to juvenile offenders. In my weekly visits to the detention centers, it took me virtually no time to recognize a pattern in these boys. Few, if any, had a father in their lives.
Most showed up at the detention center at a crucial time when external pressure from peers, internal pressure from hormones, and a need to make their own place in their world were collectively forcing them out of childhood into an adult world - a world that they knew little about, and one they were left to navigate mostly on their own.
The USA Today article focuses on what governmental agencies are trying to do to stem the problem. The only real change that will occur, however, will come as parents, particularly fathers, realize the impact they have on not only their own children, but on the societies those children will grow up in. But with the growing rates of fatherlessness in the U.S., the current prospects of that happening are not very good.
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