Americans frequently disagree over how to respond to crime, and partisan agendas sometimes lead to imprudent policy decisions, whether seen in progressive prosecutors’ refusal to charge certain offenses or in the dispatching of the military to American cities. Yet beyond the headlines, the New Right’s growing concern about the fate of the family provides a fresh opportunity for left and right to find common ground on preventing crime, particularly juvenile delinquency. The right has an opportunity to bolster families and help young men to thrive, while staying true to the fusionist alliance between traditional conservatives and libertarians.
For Republicans looking for new ways to be pro-family, now is the perfect moment to embrace data-driven strategies for crime control. Everyone wants safe cities, but they are especially important as hospitable places for raising families. At the same time, programs to prevent juvenile delinquency can help keep families together and prepare young men in particular to be good husbands and fathers to their own children. European-style pro-natal policies (such as child allowances and lengthy state-supported parental leaves) are designed to help raise birth rates, but they are expensive and thus far have shown disappointing results, both in Eastern Europe and Western Europe. In the realm of family policy, better crime control is the lowest of low-hanging fruit.
While research on what policies work to encourage fertility remains valuable, we know that prudent investments in preventing delinquency could result in fewer kids being lost to a life of crime. It could mean more productive workers to support an aging population and lower long-term incarceration costs. Most importantly, a fresh effort to reduce crime could turn depressed parts of American cities into places where families can thrive, while also helping to heal rifts between different factions of the conservative coalition. Cradle-to-grave welfare programs offend limited government conservatives, but everyone agrees that the state properly has a role in maintaining law and order.
Re-envisioning Family Policy
When Hillary Clinton wrote “It Takes a Village” in the 1990s, conservatives and libertarians alike widely condemned it as a manifesto for intrusive government overreach. Today, the landscape has transformed. Momentum is building on the right for a more robust family policy that gives government a larger role in encouraging childbearing and supporting parents.
This convergence reflects a deeper political realignment reshaping American politics. The Republican Party’s demographic coalition has transformed dramatically, now representing more voters without college degrees and significantly more lower-income voters. Critically, data shows that voters with children are more likely to identify as Republicans.
Perhaps not coincidentally, polling reveals that Republican voters now view government programs supporting child-rearing more favorably than in the past. This year, conservative states Alabama, Iowa, and Mississippi passed legislation granting paid family leave to state workers, a policy once considered firmly progressive. It may not be surprising to see California enacting legislation requiring that primary caregiver status be considered in sentencing offenders, but when Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana pass similar laws, that represents more of a shift.
These trends intersect with two growing philosophical imperatives on the right: promoting natalism to reverse declining birth rates and addressing the crisis of disconnected boys and young men. Together, these concerns could galvanize conservative support for policies that invest public resources upstream in breaking cycles of delinquency, thereby reducing the need for costly incarceration downstream. Policies like summer jobs and after-school programs for at-risk youth have long enjoyed significant bipartisan support, but they are more identified with the left.
That’s for good reason. Some progressive politicians have rarely met a government program they didn’t like, regardless of whether they have seen evidence of its effectiveness. For example, in 2023, progressive Colorado lawmakers shut down the state’s Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice, sacrificing a valuable source of data and evidence on which rehabilitation programs are working, on the altar of indulging their concerns about its inclusion of prosecutors and purported lack of racial diversity.
Center-right policymakers are more likely to demand such evidence, but appeals to them for funding prevention must contend with powerful arguments for fiscal restraint, especially at the federal level, given exploding and unsustainable debts and deficits. Recent Department of Justice cuts to crime prevention programs suggest implementation will likely occur at state and local levels, aligning with conservative federalism principles.
Some evidence suggests a growing subset of more dangerous young offenders who are typically among the least socialized young males.
Investments must be based on rigorous research that establishes a cause-and-effect relationship between the program and outcomes, such as lower rates of delinquency. This is not just a substantive imperative, but a political one. While some New Right figures like Oren Cass have broadly deviated from small-government orthodoxy, most on the center-right still prefer to reconcile family support with traditional concerns about excessive government, as seen in the National Conservativism Statement of Principles.
This tension recalls the core fusionist alliance of the 1980s, which united social conservatives and libertarians through policies of lower taxes and limited government. This approach sought to keep a lid on taxes so that more households could get by with a single earner, allowing one parent, typically the mother, to stay home during children’s formative years through reduced financial pressure.
The fraying of Reagan-era fusionism coincides notably with the erosion of the single-earner household. Whereas 49 percent of mothers with young children stayed home in 1973, just a third do so today, suggesting that dual incomes are a necessity for an increasing share of families.
Yet even while continuing to advocate for traditional family structures, personal responsibility, and low taxes, center-right policymakers must confront the reality that not every child will receive sufficient moral and tangible support at home to avoid falling through the cracks. Only by acknowledging a limited role for government in this domain can these policymakers address the crises of fertility and masculinity while also bridging free-market and social conservative factions.
By focusing on the narrow mission of preventing delinquency as opposed to the Holy Grail of ending poverty, center-right policymakers can channel limited public resources to interventions that produce sustained changes in attitudes and behavior, like cognitive behavioral therapy, coupled with mentoring in the case of a particularly successful Chicago program. Center-right policymakers can also act to prevent delinquency and crime through targeted investments in environmental strategies like improving street lighting and remediating abandoned buildings that make blighted areas more conducive to child rearing. Taken together, the fertility and masculinity crises can provide the impetus for a distinctly center-right approach to prevention programs that heeds this lesson and is also more targeted, research-anchored, and incremental. The result is a refreshed version of fusionist family policy, meeting the current world where it is at, rather than simply pining for the one of Ozzie and Harriet.
The Rise of Natalism
Natalism—actively promoting childbearing—has become a vocal movement on the right, creating a demand for a broader family policy that goes beyond traditional concerns such as eliminating abortion. It is championed by figures like Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance.
A new survey found that children aren’t among top life goals for many young women. While the US is in better shape than other developed nations, our population is forecasted to decline to just 226 million by 2100 with no net immigration, and the nation’s worker-to-retiree ratio is projected to drop from 2.9 to 1 today to 2.0 by the 2060s.
Demonstrating a growing political will to address this challenge, the “Big, Beautiful Bill” included boosted child tax credits and newborn investment accounts championed by Senator Ted Cruz. These “baby bonds” mirror a proposal from liberal Democrats Cory Booker and Ayanna Pressley, proving there is bipartisan interest in the issue.
The declining birth rate threatens economic vitality and national security while creating new impetus for crime prevention. Given the growing imbalance between elderly and working-age populations, losing youth to crime proves particularly counterproductive, reducing future workforce participation while burdening remaining workers with incarceration costs.
This natalist impulse could boost proven programs like Nurse Family Partnership, where nurses visit vulnerable first-time mothers from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday. One study found the program reduced child arrests by 59 percent by age 15, demonstrating exceptional ROI. Texas’s 2007 $241 million justice reinvestment initiative that averted billions on projected prison costs included not just short-term interventions like drug courts and mental health treatment, but also Nurse Family Partnership funding as a long-term crime and incarceration reduction strategy. This wasn’t a liberal project but a conservative-led initiative, suggesting such approaches align with fiscally conservative, data-driven governance. Similarly, after-school and summer jobs programs for at-risk youth have likewise shown some success in reducing delinquency.
The Right and Young Males in Crisis
Alongside natalism, concern on the New Right is growing about boys and young men falling behind academically, economically, and socially. Amplified in podcasting circles, this concern gains empirical support from centrist figures like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway, validating longstanding conservative worries about the devaluation of traits that traditionally have been seen as masculine, like bravery and chivalry. Just as with natalism, it is fuel for conservative interest in broad family policy and creates some overlap with concerns associated with progressives.
For decades, children’s groups that tend to lean left have focused on “disconnected youth“—mostly male teenagers who are neither working nor in school. This cohort is more likely to be arrested and incarcerated. They are also more likely to be in the child welfare system, including foster care.
Factors identified by experts—lack of male teachers, inadequate vocational programs, and the increasing number of young women more interested in their careers than marriage—may not directly cause crime, but they foster disengagement and despondency that are often precursors to delinquency. This often intertwines with rising mental illness and substance use among young males.
While overall juvenile crime rates have not increased, potentially because young people are engrossed in digital worlds, there is troubling evidence that certain serious offenses like homicides and carjackings have risen. This suggests a growing subset of more dangerous young offenders who are typically among the least socialized young males.
Fortunately, some targeted interventions can help steer kids from going down this path. Programs like Chicago’s Choose to Change, combining mentoring with cognitive behavioral therapy, show promise. A rigorous 2025 study found 23 percent fewer violent crime arrests among participants.
Given the strong connection between disconnection and justice system involvement, conservatives may find new reasons to support adult education and career training for those who dropped out of high school, championing apprenticeship models like Indiana’s initiative.
Rigorous Research and Incrementalist Approaches
What is needed at this juncture is a targeted, data-driven incrementalism that respects fiscal constraints and social complexity and aligns fiscal incentives with desired outcomes in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
In the research, the gold standard remains repeated randomized controlled trials. But as economist Jennifer Doleac notes, replicating initial findings is often bumpy. Programs may work in one context but not another, with fidelity often lost to staff turnover or local conditions. While cognitive behavioral therapy can reduce delinquency and recidivism in some settings, effectiveness depends heavily on implementation quality and whether the environment is conducive to rehabilitation. For example, a program behind bars may be delivered with fidelity to its design, but if the facility is often locked down, or if overcrowding makes facilities scarce, outcomes will almost certainly suffer.
The cost of prevention, diversion and probation programs is largely borne by local governments, but if local prosecutors put an offender in prison, the state picks up the entire bill.
Research is essential not just because it sheds light on what interventions are effective for at-risk young people or offenders of a specific profile, but also because it identifies failures. Programs like DARE and Scared Straight were largely abandoned after rigorous studies showed counterproductive results. Overall, intensive interventions for the highest-risk individuals, like the Chicago CRED program, typically prove more effective and efficient than light-touch approaches for broader populations.
Basing policy and expenditures on research, which by its nature involves trial and error, dovetails with the inherently conservative notion of incrementalism. Occasionally, new interventions arise, like text reminders for court hearings that have a negligible cost and are backed by a plethora of rigorous studies. But most proposed interventions come with a significant price tag and more limited, context-specific research. That’s a reason for favoring careful scaling over sweeping, untested transformations.
Oklahoma provides a compelling case study, as Governor Kevin Stitt has partnered with Arnold Ventures to expand programs for at-risk youth that have been independently demonstrated to be effective through randomized controlled trials. For Oklahoma, the benefit includes not just matching funds, but an ongoing evaluation component through which additional programs worthy of scaling will be identified over the coming four years.
Center-right policymakers should also prioritize targeted programs for the highest-risk young people, aiming to prevent and change delinquent behavior, over broad anti-poverty initiatives. While poverty plays an inconsistent role in property crime, its significance varies depending on the context, and other factors such as criminal thinking patterns and family and neighborhood dynamics are more highly and consistently correlated with delinquency, especially violent offending. This counsels in favor of interventions that change attitudes and behavior, as opposed to the progressive tendency to pursue income redistribution as a panacea for crime and other social ills.
Nonetheless, investing in delinquency prevention may still raise center-right skepticism, especially if it appears to expand state bureaucracy and government debt. Yet the reality is that the costs of both crime and incarceration are enormous. A seminal 2007 analysis found lifetime societal costs for high-risk youth reaching $4.2 to $7.2 million, a figure now inflated by rising correctional costs.
One way to bridge the gap is through attacking perverse fiscal incentives. In child welfare and the justice system, authorities often have real incentives to use the costliest intervention, typically residential placement or confinement. Just as steering kids away from delinquency can avert decades of costs in crime and incarceration, supporting parents in prudent ways can avert more costly removal of a child and placement in congregate living or foster care. In 2018, the bipartisan federal Families First Act revamped federal funding to ensure that states, instead of being paid based on how many removals occur, could use the same funds for prevention. Most states have now enacted legislation to implement this approach, and the number of kids in facilities and foster care fell 23 percent from a peak in 2018 to 2024.
Nevertheless, this wrong pocket problem persists in many states within the criminal justice system. The cost of prevention, diversion, and probation programs is largely borne by local governments, but if local prosecutors put an offender in prison, the state picks up the entire bill. A handful of states have sought to better align incentives and outcomes through funding schemes like Reclaim Ohio and Redeploy Illinois by which counties can use some of the funds that the state would have otherwise spent incarcerating children on other interventions. The broader lesson, though, is that return on investment is the ultimate barometer. There’s nothing conservative about keeping government on the sidelines until the most expensive intervention becomes necessary. After all, no homeowner would wait for their roof to cave in before repairing it.
Conclusion
Conservatives should continue to look for ways to reduce the size of government and the fiscal burden of the justice system, especially incarceration. However, there are reasons to make stronger efforts to keep young people from following the wrong path.
Fortunately, limited government conservatives can still agree with national conservatives that our shared future as a country depends on the success of families in nurturing a new generation of Americans. Similarly, crime violates both individual rights and a community’s sense of safety and well-being. Preventing crime is clearly a core government responsibility.
Limited government conservatives can embrace data-driven responses to delinquency, which focus as much on attitudes and behavior as on poverty, and lean on causal research and not a general willingness to treat all children as the property of “the village.” That kind of thinking can reconcile the free-market right’s small-government commitment with the New Right’s focus on natalism and masculinity.
Despite many real disagreements, a new center-right vision for preventing delinquency and crime can bridge the libertarian and conservative divide. No one is opposed to a safer, more prosperous, and more family-friendly America.