Children of Incarcerated Parents

to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would
become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers, which would
cause rates of divorce, child abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the
black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s), leading to vast
increases in the numbers of households headed by females and the higher rates of
poverty, lower educational outcomes, and inflated rates of child abuse that are allegedly
associated with these factors.
Moynihan made a contemporaneous argument for programs for jobs, vocational
training, and educational programs for the black community. Modern scholars of the
21st century, including Douglas Massey, believe that the report was one of the more
influential in the construction of the War on Poverty.
In 2009 historian Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Moynihan's fights with the New Left over
the report were a signal that Great Society liberalism had political challengers both from
the right and from the left.
Reception and Following Debate
From the time of its publication, the report has been sharply attacked by black and civil
rights leaders as examples of white patronizing, cultural bias, or racism. At various
times, the report has been condemned or dismissed by the NAACP and other civil rights
groups and leaders such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Critics accused Moynihan
of relying on stereotypes of the black family and black men, implying that blacks had
inferior academic performance, portrayed crime and pathology as endemic to the black
community and failing to recognize that cultural bias and racism in standardized tests
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