It doesn't create a poor educational culture on its own, but excessive incarceration leads to more single-parent (even zero-parent, in a sense—think: living with aunts/uncles, grandparents, et c.) families, worse job opportunities, et c, while ineffectiveness at actually curbing crime (despite our high incarceration rate) leaves lots of these kinds of areas wracked with criminality and violence on top of the damage that our policing and punishment approaches do.

That and the school-to-prison pipeline are contributing to the overall problem of—at the heart of this issue—multi-generational, persistent slums. The justice system is far from the only problem, which is why I listed others and left things open-ended to account for the huge list of other things that contribute, but it's part of it. However, I don't think much can be done about it by addressing only issues with the justice system, absent broader social reforms.

Single parent households are perfectly capable of raising children who value education, cooperation, sobriety and non-violence. I would know, I grew up in one, as did many of my peers. The key difference was and continues to be culture. The question is who is accountable for culture? Is it "society", or the individuals who perpetuate that culture in their own households?

It can both be true that a particular single-parent household is very successful, and that if you study an entire population and control other variables, single-parent households are less successful than two-parent households.

Yes it can, but it doesn't follow that these studies are justification for removing accountability from individuals, their households, culture, and practices. Nor does it follow that the solutions are not found in changes to individual behaviour.

> but it doesn't follow that these studies are justification for removing accountability from individuals, their households, culture, and practices.

Cool. I never called for that, so we're not disagreeing.

> Nor does it follow that the solutions are not found in changes to individual behaviour.

This is one of those things that's both true and useless.

> true and useless.

I'm not sure it is useless. If the problems are individual, not systemic, then the solutions lie with individual accountability, not systemic change, right?