by Allan C. Brownfeld

About the author: Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor for the St. Croix Review.

Those, such as Attorney General Janet Reno, who repeatedly speak of the “root causes” of crime rather than the need to remove offenders from society, rarely confront the nation’s skyrocketing illegitimacy rate—which is clearly a basic cause of crime, family dissolution, and social disarray.

From 1960 to 1988 the rate of children born to unmarried women soared from 5 percent to 26 percent. For blacks it is approximately 70 percent. The divorce rate has more than doubled in a generation. At any given moment, about a quarter of American children are living in a single-parent family. In 1975, among married couples with children, 41 percent of the mothers worked; in 1991 the figure was 64 percent.

Children with absent fathers...