This morning Instapundit links to this post by Clayton Cramer entitled What's Gone Wrong in Oakland.

Some quotations from the the San Francisco Chronicle given in the post.

The body count is woven into the civic consciousness here - a number chased by homicide inspectors, studied by criminologists, lamented in churches, reported by journalists. Every mayor leaves City Hall on broken promises to quell the violence, and the killings continue. An additional 115 have been killed this year, putting Oakland on pace for another gruesome record. In the last five years, 557 people were slain on the city's streets, making Oakland the state's second-most murderous city, behind Compton. Most victims are young, black men who are dying in forgotten neighborhoods of East and West Oakland. A handful of their killers, speaking from prison, describe an environment where violence is so woven into the culture that murder has become a symbol of manhood. The inmates say the only difference between these neighborhoods and prison is the absence of walls. The same hierarchies apply - the meanest rise to the top. It's a survival skill that ensures ownership of drug corners, a sense of self-worth, female attention and protection from attack.

Experts fear that the neighborhoods are only getting more violent. There are entire blocks without a single two-parent family, where drug dealers have become the predominant male role models, and children fend for themselves in crowded, chaotic homes where they are routinely exposed to drugs, sex and guns. Criminal families are on their third and fourth generations. Grandparents - the ones who have historically stepped in to help raise fatherless boys and instill a sense of right and wrong - are dying off.
...
Increasingly, the young murder suspects coming to the station for questioning seem to lack basic morality, said Sgt. Tim Nolan, who has been investigating Oakland homicides for 17 years.
"There are more and more families where there's less and less structure," he said. "Talking to these suspects day in and out, there's a higher percentage today with no sense of right and wrong. It's frightening, but we are creating super-criminals." All it takes is a look, a put-down or a lost fight, and bullets fly. Disrespect has become the No. 1 reason to kill.

...
Without parents to help them mature, the mental world of these young killers stays stuck in an infantile, egotistic state, said forensic psychologist Shawn Johnston, who has conducted more than 15,000 court evaluations of adult and juvenile criminals in 15 Northern California counties. "What keeps us from killing each other is empathy, and we learn it from bonding with parents who pick us back up when we get hurt or teased as children," Johnston said. "Without it, you get guys who live in a constant state of protecting the fantasy that they are the most important thing this side of the Milky Way. And because they don't have empathy, they will shoot or stab to protect their illusion."

Cramer, the author of Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform (Praeger, 1999), points to the parallel with the Southern culture of honor and violence in the antebellum South: the concern with honor (how do I look to others, am I being treated with respect and deference, I must maintain my place and keep others below me in their place) that is defended with violence. But, the differences are what strike him: in the Old South dualists and brawlers were a large minority, not majority; by and large the court system worked. By contrast, in the neighborhoods described by the Chronicle those who use violence have intimidated witnesses to the point that the entire community will not hold murderers to account.

(more below)

As Clayton points out, the culture of Dueling and Brawling, the violent expression of the Honor Culture of the Old South, was transformed by changes in attitude brought about by antebellum evangelical revival and moral reform that transformed individuals and societal norms. He has no hope that such a thing can happen today. Perhaps he's correct. He does, however, point to the possible solution. Can it happen?

The chaotic inner-city neighborhoods of the 19th century (and there were neighborhoods of New York City in the 1800s the police did not go into after dark) were brought into a moral order by the Roman Catholic Church, which built parishes staffed by energetic priests, and schools staffed by monks and nuns. But, today most Diocese are apt to close struggling inner-city churches for financial reasons, and the numbers of men and women taking vows has steeply declined making parochial schools too expansive in many neighborhoods.

I am not confident in the Protestant Churches by and large; most American Protestants are in "Suburban Captivity." But, I am confident in the Head of the Church and in His Spirit. A sign: The Way Out Ministries, operating in the predominently Hispanic neighborhood of Hawaian Gardens, California, an area with gang problems, is achieving success at turning lives around. Combining evangelical witness, social programs, and now a school, this RCA supported ministry is a sign of what can happen. Website under construction but some parts are up and running. If yours is not an inner-city church, how is it "partnered up" with an inner city ministry?

Clayton has little hope for change. I am skeptical that a subculture as deeply damaged as this article describes can be fixed without extraordinary and probably unconstitutional changes in criminal procedure.

I think he is on to something here. As I argued in a previous post, the kind of criminal procedures we have had since the 1960s don't really work in unstable situations.

p.s. When the San Francisco Chronicle writes an article that implicitly makes the point that strong families are needed, maybe we are not far from a positive cultural tipping point.