Parental licensure

Most of the 1,400,000 men currently locked up in American prisons would have become tax-paying neighbors had they been switched in the hospital nursery and sent home with a mature, self-supporting, married couple. The parent with whom they did go home would in most instances not have been fit to adopt someone else's baby. It is argued that perhaps the only effective way to reduce crime and the other pathologies of the growing American underclass--apart from building still more prisons--would be to require from persons wishing to birth and rear a child of their own those same minimal criteria usually expected in adoptive parents. For evolutionary reasons, human beings are reluctant to interfere with the procreational rights of any person, no matter how immature, incompetent, or unsocialized he or she might be. In consequence, human beings tend not to think about the right of the child to a reasonable opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.