Across the US, increasing numbers of Black children are growing up without fathers. Some of these families have been fatherless for up to four generations, which has profoundly impacted the wellbeing of their children for decades.
These families’ fathers are absent because of systemic racial violence and the many societal practices that led to this violence. Children – especially boys – who grow up without their dads are more likely than their peers to get caught up in that cycle of violence themselves.
Black boys are disproportionately more likely to end up in prison than their white peers, and Black people are more likely to experience police misconduct than white people. Large cities with the largest Black populations suffer from some of the highest levels of community violence in the United States. From murders to shootings and carjackings, the statistics are bleak.
We want to interrupt this cycle. Many of the egregious racial injustices which formed our current system constitute crimes against humanity. These are crimes which should be accounted for, and justice should be had. I believe there’s no better place to start than with Black men growing up fatherless. This country needs widespread reparations to heal the wounds caused by institutional racism, slavery, segregation and the War on Drugs.
I am a reparations scholar and activist, and the executive director of Reparations United, a US organisation educating and organising people for restorative justice. We have designed a programme to support fatherless men to stay in and help heal their families and communities, through a combination of reparative basic income grants, training and community support.
We’ve set up a new entity, the Federal Redress Advancement Network, and we’re currently asking the Department of Labor to establish a work and skills restoration initiative with a reparative basic income to redress the Jim Crow-era crimes that it, the department itself, committed. Our plan is ready: it now needs to be put into action.
The community impact of absent fathers
The term ‘fatherlessness’ refers to a home where a father or father-figure is not present or engaged in nurturing, educating or supporting children in the household. Numerous studies show a correlation between fatherlessness and community violence, as well as truancy and school drop-out rates.
Where one has a low chance of employment in the formal economy, one must turn to the informal economy. Although informal work includes a wide range of legal and benign jobs –from babysitting and home barbers to street mechanics and repair work – many young people find opportunities in non-legal work that can sometimes lead to violence.
Fatherless Black men are also susceptible to being drawn into the drug economy, which has low barriers to entry. Many enter after being referred by someone else, and start off in roles such as a ‘lookout’ or a ‘runner’. Often their first packages are given on consignment or ‘fronted’ to them – requiring no upfront cash to start.
This flow into criminalisation – which is facilitated by over-disciplining in schools, and Black boys often being undereducated, misunderstood, and devalued – creates what is effectively a school-to-prison pipeline. The school to prison pipeline refers to the policies and practices that effectively push children out of schools into the juvenile justice system. Forty to sixty percent of juvenile offenders become adult offenders. And once suspended from school, they face many challenges in returning and many never graduate.
RBI could interrupt the cycle
For many men, breaking out of this and entering the formal labour market would require going through an intentional process of employability. This could include participating in courses and programmes such as life skills, trauma counselling, anger management, job skills, parenting skills, high school, and vocational education.
We could interrupt the generational cycle of fatherlessness and violence and start to heal community wounds
Many of these services are already available for free or at a low cost, but the incentives for using them are limited. The disincentives, on the other hand, can be formidable (starting with exposing oneself to the perception of being ‘damaged’, ‘dumb’, or ‘dangerous’).
A multi-year guaranteed reparative basic income (RBI) conditioned on engagement with these services could shift these dynamics. Lack of drug-use or related arrest, weekly attendance, and course completion could also be conditions for receiving the reparative basic income. These rules alongside the payment would not only incentivise reduced criminality, but also ensure participants could engage consistently without worrying about where their next meal will come from.
The average monthly income for street level drug dealers is $900-$1200. Our hope is to match that amount with a basic income of $900 – a straight trade between two life paths that doesn’t come with a financial penalty.
In targeting the Department of Labor, we started by auditing the ways it has unlawfully harmed Black employability over the decades. Such actions include the 1935 National Apprenticeship Act that excluded Black people, the National Labor Relations Act (1935) and Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). The last of these intentionally excluded agricultural and domestic workers – occupations that employed approximately 60% of Black workers at the time.
This research substantiates our demand that the department participate in the reparative Work and Skill Restoration Initiative. We have also pointed to the potential economic return of the programme to sweeten the pot. Effective workforce development programmes generate $3 in economic return for every $1 invested through tax revenue, reduced public assistance, and increased consumer spending.
If approved, the initiative would be rolled out as a two-year pilot programme, impacting 130,000 young adults in five to six major cities at a cost of $2.8 billion. In years three to ten, it would be scaled up nationally.
Through this reparative programme, participants would acquire the skills and training to enter the formal economy. We believe this would greatly help them to secure a steady income and become more active members of their communities – as neighbours, friends, brothers, colleagues and fathers.
The reparative effect on our communities would therefore be twofold. Levels of violence would be immediately reduced, because less men would be engaged in informal work with gangs and in the drug economy. And more men would have the resources to engage with and support their families and communities. In this way, we could interrupt the generational cycle of fatherlessness and violence and start to heal community wounds.
Why reparations?
There is a growing understanding in the US that the disparities that exist in Black communities compared to mainstream America rest on the crimes committed during the enslavement and Jim Crow periods. With this acknowledgement also comes the understanding that these disparities will continue long into the future, unless targeted resources – or reparations – are directed to address them.
In the 2021-2023 Congressional session, 88% of the Democrats sitting in the two chambers supported reparations bills. Three states and dozens of cities have established or are pursuing reparations committees, task forces or commissions. Evanston, Illinois has already distributed $7m through its reparations housing programme.
In 2001, the United Nations held the World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa. At WCAR, the global community affirmed the international human right to be repaired from the gross violations incurred through the transatlantic slave trade, institutionalised systems of apartheid, and colonialism. They declared that the acts were “crimes against humanity”. The global economic order was built on these crimes, and as such, reparations are obligatory, both morally and legally.
The Durban Declaration gave people of African descent a global reparations framework for reparations. It holds that where crimes against humanity were committed, and where there are continued impacts from those crimes, reparations are mandatory. This is the framework around which we have based our reparative basic income programme.
US policies that led to high rates of fatherlessness
Beyond the institution of slavery and apartheid laws during the Jim Crow era, decades of US government policy has targeted and torn apart Black families.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a ‘War on Crime’. This brought in the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which empowered the national government to take a direct role in militarising local police. For the first time, local police forces were armed with surplus military weapons, equipment, and vehicles. This led to more violence toward the community and more arrests.
COINTELPRO destroyed thousands of Black lives, through assassinations, wrongful imprisonments, forced exiles, and the psychological destruction of families and movements
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Richard Nixon had established his War on Drugs. This especially targeted the Black Power Movement. Speaking about the policy in a 1994 interview, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s counsel and White House Assistant for Domestic Affairs said:
You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Around the same time, an FBI Counterintelligence Programme (COINTELPRO) established the Justice Department’s illegal war against Black nationalism and the Black community. The goal of CONTELPRO was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize Black nationalist leaders and organisations”.
This policy also criminalised and institutionalised many young people and destroyed families. Although there is no accurate number, COINTELPRO destroyed thousands of Black lives, through assassinations (including the 1969 assassination of Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party), wrongful imprisonments, forced exiles, and the psychological destruction of families and movements.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. This introduced mandatory minimum prison sentences, which resulted in harsher sentencing, removing men from their families and communities for longer periods of time. The average length of incarceration in 1984, before the act created a federal drug offense, was 22 months. By 1999, the average length was 10 years. From the mid-1980s through the 2000s, hundreds of thousands of Black men were incarcerated under mandatory minimum drug sentences. The number of people in federal prison for drug offenses increased by more than 300%.
The anti-drug law coincided with the civil war in Nicaragua, during which the CIA was reportedly helping rebel groups to traffic cocaine in the US in exchange for weapons for the Contra forces. The cocaine was dumped into Black communities around the country in the form of crack. Large segments of Black young people were pushed towards the informal drug economy.
The crack epidemic didn’t just harm one generation – it created a cascade of long-term consequences: broken families, lost wealth, widespread incarceration, health crises, and political disenfranchisement. Even as crack use has declined, the structures built during that era (mandatory minimum sentences, policing patterns, felony restrictions) still shape Black communities today.
President Bill Clinton’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, also known as the Crime Bill, then permanently removed men from the family and community. The key aspect of the bill was mandatory life sentences if a person had two prior felony convictions. These could include less violent crimes, such as burglary, robbery, and even some drug offenses. The bill also provided nearly $10bn for prisons, made it far more likely for Black Americans to get life sentences for repeat offenses, and fuelled the explosion of mass incarceration in the 1990s. Its effects are still being felt today in broken families. Thousands of men are still imprisoned serving life sentences.
In 1984, shortly after the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic), the largest for-profit prison company in the US, was established with the help of federal funding. In 1990, 7,000 people were housed in private prisons. In 2012, it was 137,000. Currently there are about 90,000 people in these private institutions.
Now is the time
All these unjust and often unlawful federal acts, programmes and policies have accumulated into the current system of mass incarceration. Over two million people are currently incarcerated in the US, with millions more under supervision. But the deepest cost is borne inside households – through fractured families, destabilised communities, and imposition of long-term harm on children.
A child’s life chances are strongly linked to the presence of stable, supportive parents. When fathers are removed through incarceration, children experience cascading disadvantages: from economic strain to emotional trauma, to educational impact, and social stigma.
These consequences are intergenerational, and further demonstrate that the single most destructive impact of mass incarceration is the creation of generations of fatherless children, who are robbed of stability, security, and opportunity.
Without serious intervention through reparative means, this cycle will continue unchecked. Now is the time for restorative justice. Now is the time to protect our future generations. Now is the time to get this funded.
Explore the feature so far
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Nika Soon-Shiong - As we fight for our lives in the South, reparations offer hope
Maggy Baccinelli - Prison labour: the last stronghold of slavery in the US
Bianca Tylek - The US is built on stolen labour. It’s time to settle the debt
Richard Wallace - Reparations for racial injustice: Black fathers must be first in line
Kamm Howard - Why we’re giving incarcerated women cash relief
Andrea James
Kamm Howard is a reparations scholar and activist, and the founder and executive director of Reparations United. From 2017-2022, he served as the national co-chair of The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, or N’COBRA. He currently serves as a commissioner of the National African American Reparations Commission.
