re: In 1998 About 1 in 42 black men had already murdered someone by the time they turned 25

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no i'm arguing that if fatherlessness is the main culprit, as another poster insinuated, then those statistics do no correlate with a rate of 75%. rather it suggests other issues being the cause.

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Fatherlessness is a big contributor, but I think there's another underlying cause: the welfare system.

The welfare system as we know it today came about on the towards the end of the Civil Rights Era. Black communities had built up significant economies, the black family was strong and getting a good education was considered a ticket to freedom and prosperity as many blacks were still poor.

Then came Johnson's Economic Opportunity Act in late 1964 (known also as the Poverty Bill). This greatly expanded not just welfare, but the federal government's role in education throughout the country.

Today our welfare system is a sticky trap. It's not just easy to get into the system, the system entices people to come into it. Once there, the programs are individually set in income tiers which makes it more difficult to get off of them as there's no 1:1 weaning process. if you break into the next tier by just $.01 then you lose all the marginal benefits between that tier and the one you just moved up from (which can be hundreds of dollars per month, depending on the program(s)).

Added to that there are multiple behavior aspects which can add or detract from the amount of benefits one gets (being married can be a penalty, while being single and having kids gets you more money-per-head, poor behavior and grades in school means SSI money, etc).

So it's not just fatherlessness, it's the cumulative impact of being anywhere from 1 to three generations into a system which inadvertently foments fatherlessness (and that's before getting into other things going on simultaneously like gangs, the War on Drugs, etc).