Show me a city full of children with no father in their lives and no fear of God, and I’ll show you a city with a youth crime crisis. Welcome to our capital.
Washington, D.C., should be the jewel in America’s crown — a city that shows off the best of what our country is and can be. But despite its world-class museums, impressive architecture, and wonderfully preserved history, our capital city has long been a cesspool of crime. Frankly, it’s a national embarrassment.
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Although by some measures crime has decreased in the district since reaching appalling highs during and after the pandemic, it is still plagued by an epidemic of youth crime. Children as young as 12 and 13 years old are roaming the streets committing heinous and pointless crimes, including armed carjackings. In fact, vehicle theft in the district is over three times the national average, and more than half of the offenders arrested over the past two years have been minors.
President Donald Trump has decided that enough is enough and has gone ahead with plans to federalize the district’s police force and reinforce them with federal agents.
I applaud the president for getting tough on crime. But if we’re really going to solve this problem, it’s not good enough just to be “tough” on crime. We also have to get smart about crime.
I’ve got about 500 youthful offenders in my program at the Jack Brewer Foundation. Regardless of race, class, location, or any other factor, virtually all of them have two things in common: They don’t have a father in their lives, and they don’t have a fear of God.
The standard “get tough” approach is to try these children as adults and lock them up in prison for lengthy sentences. For some, that’s the only realistic option. But for most, it’s the worst possible thing you can do.
These children are looking for meaning and structure in their lives. If you put them in prison with violent adult criminals, those criminals become their de facto father figures. And what do you think happens when they are released? You guessed it — they go right back to a life of crime, because it’s the only thing they’ve ever known and the only behavior they’ve ever seen modeled.
Washington, D.C., has been caught in a vicious cycle for many years. Crime gets bad, politicians demand action, and the police crack down. At first, it appears to be effective. But after a few years, when their prison sentences end, the same criminals end up back on the same streets, living the only life they know — a life of crime.
The only way out of this cycle is through rehabilitation, and that requires understanding and addressing the root causes of crime: fatherlessness and Fatherlessness.
We know how to do this. Trump gave us the blueprint in his first term when he signed the FIRST Step Act, a bipartisan prison reform bill that focused on giving incarcerated individuals the tools they need to become productive members of society. Sadly, those reforms were abandoned when Joe Biden took office.
We need to get back to that tough love approach, so that children can go into a FIRST Step Act program at a specialized facility and come out as productive citizens. Otherwise, we’re going to destroy an entire generation and end up with an even worse crime problem than we started with.
That “tough love” is the key. You have to have both, or you won’t get anywhere. Well-intentioned but misguided efforts to show compassion for children growing up in difficult circumstances have backfired spectacularly. We have schools that refuse to impose penalties for misbehavior, soft-on-crime policies that let people get away with little more than a slap on the wrist after committing serious crimes, and welfare programs that literally provide a financial incentive for fathers to abandon their families.
A MAN WENT TO PRISON FOR ASSAULTING ME. DC POLICE CRIME STATS SHOW HE WAS NEVER ARRESTED
We need to hold children and parents accountable, intelligently and compassionately. Fixing this problem is a responsibility that we all bear. A prison is not a substitute for a father, and a handout is not a substitute for a paycheck.
If we, as a nation, make a sincere commitment to getting fathers back in their homes and families back in the pews, we’ll solve the crime crisis — not just in the district but from sea to shining sea.
Jack Brewer is the chairman of the Jack Brewer Foundation, a former NFL player, and a member of the Commission on the Social Status of Black Men and Boys.