ording to the Heritage Foundation. A father's attention to his son has enormous positive effects on a boy's emotional and social development. Deloach 2. But a boy abandoned by his father is deprived of a deep sense of personal security. In a well-functioning family the very presence of the father embodies authority and this paternal authority is critical to the prevention of psychopathology and delinquency. "The overwhelming common factor that can be isolated in determining whether young people will be criminal in their behavior is moral poverty," Parker says (Parker 1996). Psychologists can predict by the age of 6 who'll be the predators. According to experts, child abuse and parents addicted to alcohol ruins these children’s lives. Each generation of crime-prone boys has been about three times as dangerous as the one before it. Psychologists believe the downhill slide into utter moral bankruptcy is about to speed up because each generation of youth criminals is growing up in more extreme conditions of "moral poverty" than the one before it. Moral poverty is defined by Webster as "growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, godless, and jobless settings. The "super-predator" is a breed of criminal so dangerous that even the older inmates working their way through life sentences complain that their youthful counterparts are out of control. Super predators are raised in homes void of loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from wrong. It is the poverty of being without parents, guardians, relatives, friends, teachers, coaches, clergy and others who habituate you to feel joy at others' joy, pain at others' pain, happiness when you do right, remorse when you do wrong. It is the poverty of growing up in the virtual absence of people who teach these lessons by their own everyday example, and who insist that you follow suit and behave accordingly (Zogli...
