Get Tough & Smart - How to Start Winning the War on Drug Addiction

My son-in-law says that incarceration creates a vicious cycle :  The prime correlate of incarceration is whether a young person grew up in a family with a father present or absent .   When a father is absent , the youth is more likely by far to wind up in prison .  Gangs supply some of the paternal functions , but in a sick way .  When fathers are incarcerated , they leave whatever family structure exists. Incarcerated dads are not in a very good moral position to tell their children to obey the law.   The sons and daughters of the incarcerated are then more likely to be incarcerated themselves, because they grew up in a family without a father present . The vicious cycle continues ...

Author Jason L. Riley, an African American, wrote a scathing book about the counter-productive effects of left-wing social policies. PLEASE STOP HELPING US - How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (Encounter Books, 2014) outlines the major problems caused by liberal policies such as minimum wage laws, affirmative action and welfare dependency. Mr. Riley contends "that efforts to help blacks have had more pernicious and lasting effects on black attitudes and habits than either slavery or segregation."  PLEASE STOP HELPING US criticizes Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow  of ignoring the much higher crime rates of African American males and the harm African American criminals do to other African Americans.  Mr. Riley's 2014 book opposes the characterization of criminals as victims of discrimination and takes on other liberal agendas such as gun control that avoid the obvious problem of black behavior. Incarceration helps law-abiding African America...