William Raspberry at the New York Post tells a story. Registration-required link. Excerpt:
Some years ago, South Africa's game managers had to figure out what to do about the elephant herd at Kruger National Park. The herd was growing well beyond the ability of the park to sustain it. The two-phase solution: Transport some of the herd to the Pilanesberg game park and kill off some of those too big to transport. And so they did.
A dozen years later, several of the transported young males (now teens) started attacking Pilanesberg's herd of white rhinos, an endangered species. They used their trunks to throw sticks at the rhinos, chased them and stomped to death a tenth of the herd – all for no discernible reason.
Park managers decided they had no choice but to kill the worst juvenile offenders. They had killed five when someone came up with another idea: Bring in mature males from Kruger – there was by then the technology to transport the larger animals – and hope that the bigger, stronger males could bring the adolescents under control.
It worked. The big bulls, establishing the natural hierarchy, became the dominant sexual partners of the females, and the reduction in sexual activity among the juveniles reduced their soaring testosterone levels and their violent behavior.
The new discipline, it turned out, was not just a matter of size intimidation. The young bulls actually started following the Big Daddies around, enjoying the association with the adults, yielding to their authority and learning from them proper elephant conduct. The assaults on the white rhinos ended abruptly. . .
For reasons arguably as benign as those that led to the tragedy of Pilanesberg, black inner cities have been denuded of adult men. It started in the 1960s with the enforcement of the man-in-the-house rule, whereby welfare families were cut off if investigators could establish that an adult able-bodied male (whether or not he was employed) lived in the household.
And the de-manizing went out of control with the introduction of absurdly long and mandatory sentences for crack cocaine offenses and the implementation of such judge-proof policies as the "three strikes" rule.
Huge numbers of black men are being taken out of their communities and the effect of their absence is at least as powerful as with the South African elephants.
Social scientists tell us that father absence is a stronger predictor of criminal behavior than family income, education – or (Bennett take note) race.
And while some individual youngsters can manage life without father reasonably well, few are able to come unscathed through fatherless communities.
Americans are right to be worried about crime. But we'd better learn from the elephants' tale and take care that the cure doesn't exacerbate the very problem we're trying to solve.
